it’s for real—I won money for filling out a survey

Sometimes I fill out surveys, sometimes I don't. Usually, if it's for a site or service I actually use a lot, I do, especially if I think the site or service sucks or if I think it's really excellent. I'm a sociologist by training, so sometimes I take the survey just because I'm interested in the construction of it, how questions are asked, how many different ways the same question is asked. One of my favorite grad school classes was all about polling and survey techniques.

Nearly every online poll offers the chance to win a bit of dinero if your email address is drawn out of a hat after the survey was complete. But I never, ever even remotely thought that I, or anyone I know or anyone they know would ever win one of the prizes. So I was pretty surprised a few weeks ago when I got a message from Dynamic Logic telling me that I was one of the winners, would I please respond with my snail mail address, etc. I didn't really believe it except that I checked out the company and it is a legit marketing research company, so what the hell -- I sent in my address.

I got the check in today's mail. A few bucks I didn't expect just before we hit the road for vacation--YAY!

I, of course, have no idea which survey I took to merit this bit of spending money. All I can say is if you're asked to do a survey by Dynamic Logic, they're legit and actually pay pretty quickly when you win.

Why all the fuss? I've been spending time working on the spam filter on our webserver, and it gets extremely depressing after a while to see bogus crap over and over and over. The cretins who dump this stuff don't even have the imagination to create different pictures or layouts. So I was in a pretty bad mood when the mail arrived, and it reminded me that there are actually more legitimate businesses on the net than spam-spewing morons.

Speaking of spam--I've found that I'm getting close to blocking entire nations, such as South Korea, China, Taiwan, Germany, Denmark ... South Korea seems to be the worst spam conduit of them all. And I've noticed disproportionate numbers of spammers use GoDaddy in some way, maybe to register domains or host, I don't know what. Comcast is another big conduit, or they're awfully easy to spoof. Something.

Ok, I've taken a long enough break -- back to spam filtering ...
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/19/03 at 05:34 PM
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