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On days like today however, I find myself so spoilt for choice that it's just about impossible to choose what story to focus on -- so I'm going to touch lightly on all the issues that are filling today's wires.

First-up, Xtra needs a kick up the backside for proving once again that they have a seemingly total lack of ability to plan ahead when it comes to provisioning mailserver capacity.

A huge number of NZers are now suffering delays or bounces as Xtra's mail system groans and crumbles under the strain of what the company calls "a significant volume of spam".

Gosh, didn't anyone tell Xtra that levels of spam are rising at an ever-increasing rate? But surely they knew this -- after all, they've been touting the fact that they have spam filters to catch all this dross.

And didn't they have very similar problems just a matter of months ago when they first installed all that filtering?

Come on guys -- you've got more money, more resources and more customers than any other ISP in the country. If *anyone* ought to be able to think ahead and provide capacity in advance of demand then it's Xtra. That they appear to be repeatedly caught out penny-pinching on such resources speaks volumes for the company's attitude to maintaining its infrastructure.

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Spam has caused a different problem for Spain's national ISP. It seems that, due to the large volumes of spams and scams being injected by customers of this ISP, they've been blacklisted -- effectively cutting virtually the whole country off from the rest of the internet world. Read the story in the headlines below for details.

Yes, spam *is* a problem for everyone!

Meanwhile, over in the USA, President Bush has declared that he wants every home in the USA to be broadband-capable within a few short years.

Good on you GW, but this sounds a lot like someone operating in election-mode to me. Recent reports published on the news wires indicate that a huge percentage of the population don't seem to want or need broadband at all -- they're more than happy with dial-up.

Now I'm not knocking the idea of giving everyone the option of using broadband, regardless of where they live, but ubiquitous broadband doesn't seem to have pushed South Korea or Japan further up the economic food-chain so I don't know that the benefits will be as massive as GW suggests.

And what are our TV broadcasters going to do when Tivo (or a clone) hits NZ's shores?

Already TVNZ are discussing their desire to launch a third free-to-air (FTA) channel which, at this point in time, could easily be funded by advertising revenues. There is, you see, a lack of TV advertising space right now.

Yes, that's right -- there are more advertisers than advertising minutes -- hence the price goes up and customers are finding that they need to book their ad-space well in advance.

So what happens when the Tivo/clone comes along and effectively reduces the value of that ad-space? What will the broadcasters do to claw back the lost revenues?

Perhaps they'll follow TV3's horrific lead by plonking ad-banners along the bottom of the screen, smack in the middle of other programmes?

Turn off the box folks, get back to the Net!

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