Fellow Gnomedexer Jeremy Hubert had this on his blog:

Russian Spammer Beaten to Death

MOSCOW — The director of an English language center and one of the country’s most notorious spammers was found beaten to death in his apartment in central Moscow, police said Monday.

Along with a request:

Happy? Sad? Neither? Poetic Justice? What do you think?

Here you go Jeremy:

Ya know, a serial killer affects a small number of people in a huge way. A rapist a smaller number in a way that is less serious (although some victims might diagree with that). A thief, usually a smaller number of people yet, and much, perhaps most, of the pain is ultimately felt by insurance companies.

Spammers affect huge numbers of people in a fairly minor but consistantly annoying way. They render the most impressive and capable communications systems we have almost ineffective. They’re cowards, and economic bottom feeders. By sheer volume and presence, they have a large effect on a large number of people. There is no compensation, no restitution - we have lost nothing tangible, only time and trust.

I don’t advocate the ritual beating of these guys (wait - I just got a great new reality TV show idea), but if I found a cop investigating this beating, I’d turn his head toward the latest murder, most recent rape, or the nearest missing car stereo.

If there were ever two applications that needed to be mushed together, like chocolate and peanut butter, they are LinkedIn and Plaxo.

LinkedIn is networking, and one of the side benefits is that it also stores contact information. Unfortunately, the tools to get contact info out and sync’d to a computer or PDA are primitive at best.

Plaxo does a great job syncing calendar, notes, tasks and of course contacts, but doesn’t have any networking capability. It does have a feature where other Plaxo users who happen to be in your contacts list are kept up to date automatically. Otherwise you have to do it the old fashioned way, or use their near-spam update email function.

The two need to get together. It just makes sense that the folks you tend to contact are people you’re close to, or at least familiar with, and those people are likely in your network. But not always, so there needs to be a little leeway.

The only thing that’s missing from both of them is a good PDA interface/application. Here’s the vision: You’re sitting in a bar/restaurant/trade show booth, and you learn of a need. Out comes the PDA, tap, tap, search, search, and off goes a request to someone you know, followed shortly by beaming the contact to the person you were talking to, followed (perhaps) by their being linked in to your network.

More and more people need their data to be portable - the Lifedrive is evidence of that. I think, though, the solution will lie in synchronized web apps like Plaxo, Backpackit, and the like. I don’t think it will be too much longer before people are going to see networking as an integral part of the contact/email/PIM experience. I know it’s new right now, and people are getting used to how the systems work and how best to use them, but soon it will be something folks just expect to have.

When you tie all of this together, you have LinkedIn, plus Plaxo, plus Outlook all on the web with a small client on the desktop/laptop/PDA to facilitate use when you’re not connected.

Who will offer it first?

New communication technology has been born.

RSS, or really simple syndication, was created specifically for the purpose of syndicating news. The creators knew that email newsletters were archaic and push-oriented, and that the day would come when nobody would travel to dozens of sites to see what was new and the world would need something better.

They were right, and RSS has grown rapidly. Scoble says no RSS feed is a marker of a lame site. Given how easy it is to keep up with a pretty large number (say, more than 50, Scoble claims he tracks over 1000) of sources using a news reader and RSS, I agree with him.

The Graphics Industry should be leading.

The news outlets that serve the graphics industry - you know, ink on paper, which is doing just fine thank you - are lagging. But we shouldn’t be lagging, we should be leading. After all, our business is about communication.

Here’s a list of the popular news outlets who don’t have RSS:

• 
  Newspapers and Technology - They are sharp enough to toss a few Adsense ads at the bottom of the page, however.
• IFRA
• Graphic Arts Monthly
• High Volume Printer - They don’t really even have a website - but they do have archives on-line.
• Printing World, aka www.dotprint.com - They have a list of news links on their main page.
• Gravure Magazine - They do have an index for the current issue available as a .pdf file.
• Graphics Communication World, aka “The Green Sheet” - This one stumps me - no advertising, no graphics, not much layout. It’s basically a printed blog with a hefty subscription fee. With RSS they could integrate ads and probably reach a wider audience - at $300/year, it’s a tough sell for everyone but the brass. Would ads in the feeds combined with a much larger audience be a better deal for them?
• WorldofPrint.com - Another page full of new links, but no feed.
• WhatTheyThink.com - Another hefty-fee news+analysis site, although their tag-line is “Competitive Intelligence for Printing Executives”. Lots and lots and lots of ads though.
• PrintWeek
• GAIN - Graphic Arts Information Network

I’m pretty sure I missed more than a few. Now, to those who are more enlightened:

• PrintOnDemand.com
• PrintingTalk.com
• Dr. Joe’s Printing Industry Blog - Of course he gets it, he’s a blogger. Actually, really the only serious graphics industry blogger out of the two out there - three if you count me.
• Commerical Printing News - A default/stock WordPress blog being run as a news aggregator, had RSS by default.

Here we have an industry that at its root is about communication, but it isn’t using or promoting the latest technology. Worse yet, the press manufacturers and even controls manufacturers like QuadTech aren’t either. The technology in this industry is cutting edge in so many areas, yet many manufacturers barely update their sites.

Our audience deserves better.

It doesn’t seem right to me that someone deciding whether to spend $250 on a Roomba vacuum cleaner can choose from dozens of blogs, newsgroups and other websites to gather information, but someone deciding whether to spend $250,000 on graphics equipment seems to have much less to choose from. Ditto on new work flows, techniques and just news in general.

When I tell people I work for a printing company, more than half the time the conversation quickly finds its way to how quickly the Internet is having an effect on print. My answer is that my employer, QuadGraphics, is the fastest growing printer around. Harry Quadracci always said that the Internet had increased our business. I still get paper magazines for lots of reasons.

Perhaps the publishers listed above feel some need to not be seen to embrace the Internet too closely. Maybe there’s a feeling that if they make their content too convenient on the web, folks won’t desire the printed edition, although anyone who’s read Newspaper Techniques or Gravure knows how silly that is. Maybe they don’t want to insult their readership, which makes some sense I guess.

Whatever effect the Internet is going to have on print, it’s coming whether we like it or not.

By not leveraging emerging technology, we’re showing a lack of leadership in the fundamental purpose of our industry. If we’re going to be on the web, then let’s leverage all the technology we can to reach our audience. Especially since implementing RSS is basically free. Microsoft announced at Gnomedex that they are going to integrate support for RSS in future products, and once that happens the last barriers to common-man-in-the-street usage of RSS will fall.

Let’s be the communication leaders on the Internet that we are off the Internet.