From Wikipedia
E-mail spam is the most common form of internet spamming. It involves sending unsolicited commercial messages to many recipients. Unlike legitimate commercial e-mail, spam is generally sent without the explicit permission of the recipients, and frequently contains various tricks to bypass e-mail filtering.
Spammers obtain e-mail addresses by a number of means: harvesting addresses from Usenet postings, DNS listings, or Web pages; guessing common names at known domains (known as a dictionary attack); and “e-pending” or searching for e-mail addresses corresponding to specific persons, such as residents in an area. Many spammers utilize programs called web spiders to find e-mail addresses on web pages (see also address munging).
Many e-mail spammers go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their messages. They might do this by spoofing e-mail addresses (similar to Internet protocol spoofing). The spammer will modify the e-mail message so it looks like it is coming from another e-mail address. However, many spammers make it easy for recipients to identify their messages as spam by placing an ad phrase in the From field. Spammers try to circumvent the email filters by intentionally misspelling common spam filter trigger words. For example, “viagra” might become “vaigra”, or other symbols may be inserted into the word as in “v/i/a/g./r/a”. E-mail service providers have begun to use the misspellings themselves as a filtering test.
The most dedicated spammers�often those making a great deal of money or engaged in illegal activities, such as the pornography, casinos and Nigerian scam businesses�are often one step ahead of the providers. Retail e-mail services are updated constantly with improved spam filters, keeping track of spammers’ technological progress by examining e-mails their users report as spam (providers today have a prominent button to report spam).
So-called “spambots” are a major producer of e-mail spam. The worst spammers create e-mail viruses that render an unprotected PC a “zombie computer”; the zombie will inform a central unit of its existence, and the central unit will command the “zombie” to send a low volume of spam. This allows spammers to send high volumes of e-mail without being caught by their ISPs or being tracked down by antispammers; a low volume of spam is instead sent from many locations simultaneously.
Bill Gates, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2004, predicted that spam would soon be “a thing of the past”, and that Microsoft was working on several temporary solutions, as well as on a permanent “magic solution”, to spam (See “Solutions and Countermeasures” below).
Microsoft’s Office Accounting Express 2007 is tailored to small business. It can handle invoicing, payroll, and profit & loss reporting. It also includes easy access to eBay, PayPal and credit card processing services.
Office Accounting Express 2007 is compatible with other Office programs. For example, allows you to customize forms such as invoices using Word. It can sync with contact information in Outlook. It can also work with data from QuickBooks, Money, Excel or Access. Best of all, Office Accounting Express 2007 is free.
1. Search Engine Optimization: Become an expert in your field, add lots of good content to your site, blog, Twitter, make speeches, write a book. Monitor your website traffic with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools and tweak your site based on what you learn. Consider registering a domain name that has your keywords in it, if available.
2. Search Engine Optimization and Google Adwords: Do all of the above and then buy your keywords and phrases from Google Adwords. You can offer to pay x cents per click (ppc) for your search phrase, you may have to outbid other sellers to get your listing up higher on the search results list. You can cap your cost with your budget. This should be done after number 1 is completed.
From Wikipedia
On May 24, 2007, Facebook launched the Facebook Platform, which provides a framework for developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. Even games such as chess and Scrabble are available. As of December 5, 2007, there are more than 10,000 applications.
Third-party websites such as Adonomics, which provides application metrics, and blogs such as AppRate, Inside Facebook and Face Reviews have sprung up in response to the clamor for Facebook applications.
On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the “Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund,” becoming the world’s first Facebook-only venture capital firm.
On August 29, 2007, Facebook changed the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, in order to give more attention to the more engaging applications, following criticism that ranking applications only by the number of users was giving an advantage to the highly viral, yet useless applications. Tech blog Valleywag has criticized Facebook Applications, labeling them a “cornucopia of uselessness.” Others have called for limiting third-party applications so the Facebook “user experience” is not degraded.
Primarily attempting to create viral applications is a method that has certainly been employed by numerous Facebook application developers. Stanford University even offered a class in the Fall of 2007, entitled, Computer Science (CS) 377W: “Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook”. Numerous applications created by the class were highly successful, and ranked amongst the top Facebook applications, with some achieving over 3.5 million users in a month.
