The smiley :-) and its many variants are an important (and fun!) part of the worldwide online social culture -- allowing emotions to be conveyed in plain text. It has been in widespread use since the early '80s, when it was first proposed. Yet the original message in which the smiley was invented had been lost -- until now. :-) After a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x). Here is Scott's original post:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-) From: Scott E Fahlman
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
:-(
-----------------------------------------------------
Thanks to Anders Rask (well, now you got the link to his homepage, please mail him to get some good stuff on his homepage), I found this at Microsoft research.
There is more here.
A new way of looking into spam has been launched from one of the Napster founders. It is called SpamNet from the company cloudmark. The idea is that spam mail is send to millions of users and when an user hits the "block" button, the spam mails is reported to the SpamNet, and based on the user and the quality and regularity of his previous reports it is rated. The filtering algoritm is then based on all the blocks and the user ratings. It sounds great, is easy to install - so now I just have to verify that it works...