When people say that they get a lot of spam, my eyes have a tendency to glaze over. Thing is, they don't get a lot of spam. I get a lot of spam. Between all of my various email accounts, some of which I've had for over ten years, I get approximately three spam emails a minute. I'll repeat that, just for emphasis: three spams a minute.

I've got a pretty good network of filters in place that mean I only ever see about five or six a day in my inbox, and I have a special folder in Mail that has unread messages which have a high likelihood but not 100% certainty of being spam, which will collect about 50 messages a day. I usually give them a quick subject line scan before I do a select-all delete and I noticed an interesting thing as I read through this afternoon.

Spams tend to come in a couple of varieties. You've got your porn, your offers of sexual performance aids, your pharmaceutical sales entreaties, and your scammers phishing for passwords and personal information. I also get a lot of emails offering me some hot new product for free if I'd only go and fill in a form that gives them my firstborn child, a pint of blood, and the balance of my bank account. Those aren't interesting in and of themselves - unless you happen to have an extra child that you're looking to get rid of - but what is interesting is that the spammers are pretty good at picking the products they offer.

zeit·geist | Pronunciation:  'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt  |  Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

So I started thinking: what if I setup an email address and got it signed up to as much spam as possible, then had a script check for product and celebrity names in each message. A running tally of each mention, plotted against time, might give you a really interesting look at the pop culture zeitgeist from the same period. Different email addresses (e.g.:  Hotmail in the US, Canada, China, etc.) would likely give you a sense of regional variations on popularity. It would be a little like Google's Zeitgeist reports or the recent Google Trends, but less searchy and more spammy. Someone want to tackle this? I've got plenty of source material.