It’s kinda useless, but I ended up wasting a few minutes playing around with PhoneSpell, so I guess it must have some appeal for people with too much time and a playful brain…

Enter a 6 to 10 digit phone number and we’ll show you what words and phrases your phone number spells to help you decide if you want to keep it. Opening a business and need a new phone number? Pick a new 7 or 8 digit phone number by typing in an available exchange (first 3 to 5 digits) and see what one-word numbers you can choose from. Searching for just the right toll free number to advertise? Type in letters and it will show you the corresponding phone number.

By “doing something against spammers“, I didn’t mean that. But still, some people may argue that it had to happen, sometime…

Russian spammer found beaten to death
One of Russia’s best-known spammers has been found beaten to death in his apartment in central Moscow, according to police reports.
(…)
Kushnir is alleged to have sent millions of unsolicited emails offering English classes at the American Language Center run by his company. The emails were rumoured to have hit every PC in the country at least once.

Then again, some people would argue that Vardan Kushnir’s death had nothing to do with spam and that it was an ordinary robbery.

The police have found out that Vardan Kushnir, was seen leaving a Moscow night club accompanied by three girls. In the spammer’s apartment investigators found traces of sleep inducing drugs in the wine. The police are assuming that this wasn’t enough to put Kushnir to sleep, and that he probably tried to fight his attackers when they tried to rob him.

“Tired of receiving mounds of unsolicited letters and offers in the mail? Want to fight back? Want to get rid of that old tire in your garage that the garbage man won’t take?”

I heard about this trick a few years ago, and forgot about it. I just stumbled across Jason Bell’s “Postage Paid Envelope Revenge” with a step-by-step process and I thought it would belong here. Big companies often mail people unsolicited advertising letters, and they usually enclose postage-paid envelopes. The original trick I was told involved mailing back all the junk mail that didn’t contain a return-to envelope in one that had it. Jason’s original idea is to attach 20 kilos of additional junk you already have in your house and you want to get rid of.

It is free and it annoys people who usually are the ones annoying you. Plus, it is arguably 100% legal. I guess the drawback in the long run would be that they would stop sending prepaid return-envelopes altogether. But meanwhile, you can have some fun… I just wish someone came up with a way to do this with email spam…

Yahoo!News, last week:

News Corp. (NYSE:NWS) on Monday said it would buy Intermix Media Inc. (AMEX:MIX), owner of the popular MySpace.com social networking site, for $580 million in a move to expand the media conglomerate’s Internet offerings.

“For a company with a market capitalization of over $50 billion and $6 billion in revenue last quarter to pay $580 million for the fifth most widely viewed domain, that strikes me as reasonable,” said Natexis Bleichroeder analyst Alan Gould.

“Reasonable”… Yep, the Net economy is back all right!

“The thing about MySpace is that it’s a growing audience,” said Jupiter Research analyst David Card. “Its users are pretty loyal. They get a lot of time spent on their pages. And the personal information they get from users is pretty reliable because they want to meet people. One would think this information would be pretty useful to advertisers.”

This is classic! A “growing audience” that is “pretty reliable”.

Intermix was the target of a lawsuit by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who accused the company of false advertising and deceptive business practices in bundling hidden spyware that delivered pop-up advertising and redirected Web traffic to an Intermix search engine.

Who said the Internet bubble was gone??

If I had 100$ to waste on a domain name just because it makes me smile, I would buy fuckr.com. But I don’t, so I just enjoy flickr.com very much instead…