SPAM: where's it come from?

Wikipedia: Spam

"Origin of the term

It is widely believed the term spam is derived from the 1970 SPAM sketch of the BBC television comedy series "Monty Python's Flying Circus".

The sketch is set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes SPAM luncheon meat. As the waiter recites the SPAM-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song repeating "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM... lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM", hence "SPAMming" the dialog. The excessive amount of SPAM mentioned in the sketch is a reference to British rationing during World War II. SPAM was one of the few meat products that was excluded from rationing, and hence was widely available."

You can see how this would quickly be extended to electronic spamming.

The PageRank algorithm we discussed in class is also abused in another form of spamming:

"Spamdexing (a portmanteau of spamming and indexing) refers to a practice on the World Wide Web of modifying HTML pages to increase the chances of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. These sites use "black hat search engine optimization techniques" to unfairly increase their rank in search engines. Many modern search engines modified their search algorithms to try to exclude web pages utilizing spamdexing tactics."

I actually never liked Spam until recently, when my girlfriend introduced me to Spam musubi. Apparently it's really popular in Korea and Hawaii. Simple, greasy, and delicious. Yum.