Given the volume of spam representing over 50% of the world's email traffic, obviously to some it represents a huge sample to draw sadness or anger out of, and of course, visualize the findings. One man's spam is Alex Dragulescu's art :"He doesn't use Photoshop but simply writes code to create computer art. For the Spam Plants, he parsed the data within junk e-mail--including subject lines, headers and footers--to detect relationships between that data. Then he visually represents those relationships. For example, the program draws on the numeric address of an e-mail sender and matches those numbers to a color chart, from 0 to 225. It needs three numbers to define a color, such as teal, so the program breaks down the IP address to three numbers so it can determine the color of the plant. The time a message is sent also plays a role. If it's sent in the early morning, the plant is smaller, or the time might stunt the plant's ability to grow, Dragulescu said. The size of the message might determine how bushy the plant is. Certain keywords, such as "Nigerian," might trigger more branches. But Dragulescu did not inject any irony. Messages about Viagra do not grow taller, for example."
I feel that now every spammer can pretend about being a stylish art admirer, with his spamming historical performance hanging on the wall, or perhaps it's my surrealistic black humor.
Related posts on spam and visualization :
Fighting Internet's email junk through licensing
An Over-performing Spammer
Consolidation, or Startups Popping out Like Mushrooms?
Dealing with Spam - The O'Reilly.com Way
Visualization, Intelligence and the Starlight project
Visualization in the Security and New Media world
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