I'm currently trialling the Cloudmark's SafetyBar anti-spam software, after learning about it from Chris Anderson. Here's what interests me: at the moment, I am not plagued with Spam and the built-in filters on Outlook 2003 work pretty well. So far, Cloudmark seems a slightly more discriminating filter but not that much more. And yet, I feel I'm going to be tempted to subscribe at the end of my 30 days.

Why?

Because I love the operating model for SafetyBar. It's collaborative, pooling the indvidual decisions by subscribers to label various items as Spam, Fraud or Benign to create a constantly updating database to guide filtering. First that's ingenious and the geek in me likes to support ingenuity. Second, in a small way it gives me a sense of belonging to something worthwhile. The sense of being part of a movement of the good guys to combat the antisocial spammers.

Although Cloudmark attempts to assess the cost (and time) savings its filter gives me, my own guess is that it may be not be saving me that much of either... but I still want to support it.

This interests me. And I think it contains a rather intriguing thought experiment for other folks trying to sell stuff. Are you creating the value of community for your users?

PS. I'm also now evaluating the latest version of Zempt, the offline blog editor. So far, I'm impressed. I still get the occasional bug when uploading. This seemed to happen quite a bit with the the earlier version and made me stop using it - so far this one seems a lot more reliable and it does save me time posting. I'm jolly grateful to the open sourcers who've created this out of the kindness of their hearts. I'll be evaluating it further over the coming weeks.