It’s interesting that online retailer Bluefly is taking their e-mail delivery in-house because of fears their messages will be caught by spam filters if they use an outside technology partner. Most people do this in the exact opposite order – outsourcing for fear of being labeled spammers. Thing is though, companies are in a bit of a bind as most large e-mail services providers are now (rightly or wrongly) on blacklists across the Net. At the same time, companies don’t want to appear on those lists themselves, so they are stuck.
Given the war on Iraq, killer viruses, and “Orange Alerts”, many of you are probably looking to find reliable information fast. Certainly Newsworld and CNN can provide an instant visual fix, but there are times when you are not near a TV, or you’re looking for in-depth commentary, or alternate viewpoints from around the world.
In all these cases, I suggest you temporarily set your browsers default homepage to Google News.
If you haven’t discovered Google News yet, you’ll be surprised at the effectiveness of this service which automatically collects and sorts links from leading international news sites in near real-time.
Of course there is no saying what will happen to your productivity if you do in fact check Google News every time your browser loads. Maybe a bookmark would be a better idea.
BTW, Cloudmark’s Spamnet which I’ve been using since the first beta version seems to have really nailed its algorithms with the latest beta version (Beta 9) of their MS Outlook plug-in. I’m now finding that over 95% of spam is being filtered correctly and the number of false positives seem to have dropped quite a bit.
It’s also worth noting that the false positives are pretty permission-based lists that have at least one of these three characteristics:
1. In frequent mailers – companies that don’t send for a long time seem to get picked up (probably because people don’t recognize them). CNMA is in this camp.
2. Low value lists – things that are probably of far less value than the subscriber would have expected. People “block” the messages rather an unsubscribing.
3. Drifting permission – mailers seem to be pushing the bounds of permission and getting penalized for it. For example content-heavy newsletters get through but if they send a “special offer” from a “valued partner” they get tagged as spam.
Senderbase.com is a new service from IronPort (an anti-spam company) that offers a peak into who the big online mailers are, including estimates on how much mail is coming from each company.
Of course there is a hidden implication in a lot of Ironport’s language that just because someone sends a lot of mail they should therefore be filtered out and can’t be permission-based or welcome in users’ in-boxes.
The arms race between legitimate mailers and ISPs seems to be escalating.
The The Center For Democracy & Technology has released an interesting study of where spammers get e-mail addresses (it’s a 16 page PDF). It offers some fairly practical tips on cutting down on likelihood of your address being trapped by address harvesting apps. The best advice is to simply replace the “@” in your e-mail with word “at”, so that “example@schafer.com” is written as “example at schafer.com”. This seems to fool all e-mail harvesters but after a moment’s thought is intuitive to most humans.
People are forever missing the point on how to do a presentation. PowerPoint just makes matters worse by encouraging presenters to use the screen for THEIR needs (i.e. putting their speaking notes up on the screen) instead of the audiences needs (i.e. to provide visual clues to the structure and meaning of what is presented).
Doc Searls had some good advice on giving presentations back in 1998 that are still mostly relevant (although the suggestions to use hotbot to steal copyrighted images seems a bit out of touch with the times!).
Great article on ClickZ by Danny Sullivan. The article goes into great detail on Contextual Advertising, including a look at what Google is doing, like the Google AdWords ads that appear within banners on BlogSpot Blogs like IsThatLegal?
If you’re looking for wonderful, mindless distraction, go directly to panoramas.dk and try out some of the full-screen QTVR images. If you haven’t seen these 360 degree photographic images, you’re in for a treat. And if you have, you should still check out the full-screen gallery because they are very large, high quality images that go beyond much of what I’ve seen previously. (link via boing boing)
“The web is dead and will be replaced by an executable architecture.” So says Forrester CEO George Colony.
The sort of bluster is unbecoming of leading Internet thinkers, but understandable given that making bold statements is what gets Forrester the press that gets them the clients.
I think that the idea of the “X Internet” or executable Internet is already a reality in places, but Colony falls for a classic mis-interpretation of the Net. People feel an uncontrollable urge to say “The Net is…” and pick one thing, or one analogy for the entire net. If the “Net is…” anything, it is the infrastructure that most non-real-time human-to-human and human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interaction will happen over. What we’re communicating and how we communicate it is entire up to the parties involved. Sometimes it’s static content on a page, sometimes a stream of consciousness weblog, sometimes an online application, sometimes a web service, sometimes it’s software, sometimes it’s entertainment, sometimes it’s something we never imagined.
I suggest we all stop trying to limit the Net by overdependence on real-world metaphors.
The Shirky article I just mentioned had a link to a Wikipedia page called “Our Replies To Our Critics” which gave me a new perspective on this fascinating experiment.
Wikipedia is kind of an “encycopedia by consensus” where anyone can add or edit and article on anything. While this sounds rediculous when heard for the first time, the logic explained by the replies to critics page makes some good points.
Clay Shirky’s analysis of why the Net is different is always refreshing, particularly in these days when it seems that there is little interest in change and innovation online.
Clay’s done a great piece on the “group-as-user” and the impact on software and site development.
Here’s a quote to set the context…
“The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the interent has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.
The thing that makes social software behave differently other communications tools is that groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit be behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation. This means that designing software for group-as-user is a problem that can’t be attacked in the same way as designing a word processor or a graphics tool.”
A ClickZ article called “Context Is King, or Is It?” follows-up nicely on my “context is the only way” comment yesterday.
The article talks a lot about the Google “Content-Targeted AdWords” program. This new program allows advertisers to use content sites Google partners with to run AdWords-like ads within those sites. The thing that makes this different from an ad network like DoubleClick, is that the ads published on those pages directly relate to what the page is about. By using Googles massive and intelligent search algorithms, the AdWords on the partners pages are always relevant (i.e. in context for the user).
One example Google provides is of the “How Automatic Transmissions Work” page at howstuffworks.com. The page includes Adwords from Google that sell rebuilt transmissions, etc. Of course the live execution of the page doesn’t quite live up to the mock-up because the funnel is not full of willing advertisers yet.
The article also is the first to (kind of off-handedly) mention what I think is the real reason Google bought Blogger - big heaping wads of context to put Content-Targeted AdWords in. I think a lot of the blogging community looked at it as a technology purchase rather than an ad placement opportunity. Follow the money.
Google is brilliant. By purchasing Blogger and implementing Content-Targeted ads within it, they have cut the two biggest costs associated with running an ad-based content site – the cost of selling the ads, and the cost of creating the content. The process is essentially automated with Google left to manage the infrastructure and cheque credit card deposits.
