What's with the spam?

I thought that we agreed that spam is canned meat that most people just don't eat. So, why is there a spam add on this blog site???
It is incredibly annoying and I'm sure that no one actually believes that they won free M&Ms! The reason why companies send out spam is because they hope that if they can reach a lot of people that some of them will respond to the ad. Unfortunately, the only reason I clicked on this ad is because I wanted it to stop beeping and blinking.
Just wondering... Did anyone actually fill out the form to receive free candy?

It is on this site, as discussed in class, because there is very little cost to it with some amount of benefit. I'm not sure exactly how this notion transfers from sending spam email to putting up annoying ads, but I think the concept is similar. Either way, you gave them positive reinforcement to be here when you clicked on it and probably put a couple more cents in their jar. Next time, just hit mute or refresh the page until a less annoying ad appears.

Origin of the term spam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_spam#Origin_of_the_term.

I use adblock plus as an addon on firefox (http://adblockplus.org/en/installation). From my understanding, it blocks ads from known servers. It seems to work fairly well, as I have no idea what you're talking about when you say you see ads here.

It brings up an interesting point - when we use these adblockers, it seems to be effectively cutting edges of the web. My computer doesn't load the ads, and so i dont' even have a link to click to go off the page. This makes the web different for each person - we imagine that we're all accessing the web from different nodes, but really we're all looking at different (parallel) webs. My web doesn't have a link to whatever site is linked, while yours may.