New Year's Resolution 2: Subscribe to email from lots of web sites

To some, this comes naturally, to others it is a complete change in online behavior.

As someone who used to get a bit ticked off when "unsubscribe" functions on a web site would trigger a message saying this will take 2 weeks, the plan to subscribe to more useless notifications, product news and other crap may be unusual.

But after a re-evaluation, the situation is different: it is a win-win.

All those companies. institutions, and non-profits with or without products but always with "news" or "important notifications" use the number of subscribers for many purposes. One of them being the decision to provide the resources needed to produce a newsletter or email blitz in the first place.

By signing up for tons, we imagine that we provide unpaid internships or give low paid writers something to do.

And we help those who want to save everything we do online by making their jobs more valued, we help their procurement people, we help software makers around the globe.

Realizing the power of inertia, the extent of this venture may not become an all out information grab on our part but a handful of new accounts with several assigned happy producers of product emails, event notifications and adult services spammers will be a start.

Old mustached German (OMG), familiar to some of our readers, broke into a grin so wide we feared for his jaw muscles. I like it, he said, you are turning a fuck me site into a fuck you site!

This old German bluntness is still refreshing to our ears after all these years.

Our intention is more nuanced, we have the Random Research (RR) team ready for the online sex dating sites. The RR team will try to find out how many gorgeous 25 year old women are really interested in hooking up with a balding, slightly overweight 40 year old male.

Other notifications are meant to enlarge our online presence, showing us to be voracious, sophisticated citizens.

And who cares if the newsletter from protein folding web site Folding@Home goes into the same inbox as an update from, say "college rules"?