If Canada is the largest exporter of oil to the US, is priming to double it’s output capacity, and of course is not a part of the lovable cadre called OPEC, then I have an extemporaneous question…

Why are we kissing the Middle East’s ass, instead of our friendly northern neighbors’?

Most of the people I know who have weblogs are technology and marketing folks. They have embraced the medium hoping to spread their mantra or help someone with a problem, and in some cases they get a few listeners or contribute a solution. The rest aire differences, bash companies, talk about their significant others, what they ate for lunch yesterday, and spread nasty rumours about their political opponents.

The first group wants to be there, and understand the whats and whys of being there. The rest may or may not understand that their words can be archived for eternity, subject to scrutiny, and even get them in hot water (if they say dangerous things).

Once someone calls you out, don’t expect to dance around the issue. You said it, and now you have to pay for it. And keep in mind that your audience comes to your blog to listen to ideas - they don’t care what you do for your day job. And that audience could be anyone, anywhere. Nobody will be particularly impressed by where you live, that is unless you are crossing a border under questionable immigration auspices.

A few weeks back Spamroll questioned (along with CAUSE Canada) whether all the cute little stats saying email spam was slowing were on target (see Canadians Doubt the News Too).

Now more real users have weighed in on the matter over at ITBusiness.ca, and nobody stands corrected as of yet.

I was impressed that Telus of Canada was utilizing RSS to get their marketing message on the street (see RSS Marketing for more on how this works). I was even more impressed that the message was a quick and dirty, common-sensical guide on avoiding phishing exploits. Take a look at Gone phishing – forged e-mails, spoofs and scams - myTELUS, and tell me what you think.

I think it is one more example of taking care of your users.

Spamroll doesn’t believe that spam is slowing, and neither do the Canadians. While there maybe some credence to the idea that they are simply ignoring it (mentioned earlier in Canadians Ignoring Spam…how dare they!), there is still some doubt regarding any trend.

CAUSE Canada shoots a lot of holes in the news, which they note has been picked up by wires all over the place, in Canadian Spam Levels Dropping? I don’t _think_ so!.

Spamroll agrees with the analysis, but you judge for yourself. Particularly interesting was the dissection of the survey and its results, which note that just because users are receiving less spam doesn’t mean there isn’t more spam in the system. In this case, we would have to give a few kudos to the anti-spam software providers (although we may already have given them our money), but that, again, doesn’t mean the problem is getting solved through stiffer legal penalties.

Note: Spamroll supports stiffer laws, when correctly implemented.

For more interesting commentary on this issue, check out Slashdot | Canadian Spam Levels - Up? Down? You Be the Judge.