Wired News: Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?:
“While no one has sympathy for the devils that fill inboxes with promises of lower mortgages and larger members, not everyone is supporting the new movement to banish spammers from the Internet.
Some online advocates worry that heavy-handed antispam measures, such as centralized blacklists and charging for delivery, will destroy e-mail.”
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Fascinating post on GlennLog called “Hating”.
While the post is really about a war Dave Winer is having with a user, I wanted to note Glenn’s central theme regarding the imminent end of privacy (my words not his):
“This kind of permanence has set in on the Web in a way that only a small percentage of people understand. Post to Usenet — ever? It’s there, forever. Post a Web page for a few months? Google has an archive, and if it’s up long enough, so does The Internet Archive, which, with a few keystrokes, brings up the history of every page they’ve archived at a given URL.”
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Inc.com “Caught in the Crossfire”:
“Now, after finally figuring out how to make e-mail work for them, marketers have found that the rules have changed. Their legitimate messages are being blocked by a new breed of super-aggressive spam filters; their good names are turning up on anti-spam blacklists; and they’re being forced to devote time, energy, and in many cases, a good outlay of cash to keep their e-mail marketing efforts out of hot water. ‘The landscape has changed,’ says Al DiGuido, CEO of Bigfoot Interactive, a New York – based e-mail marketing services provider. ‘This is not the same business it was a year ago.’”
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News.com “Air France wins ‘typosquatting’ case”:
“French carrier Air France won on Wednesday the right to take over a Web site that uses a garbled version of its name apparently to steer business toward other travel companies and some finance firms.
The ruling, the latest in a growing number of ‘typosquatting’ cases, was handed down by the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which runs an arbitration service for Internet name disputes.”
I’ve long recommended that companies register typos and common variations of their site, corporate, and brand names and point them to their official site. You should do this to a) help users who want to visit your site but don’t type well and b) to avoid typosquatting. Note that a lot of people won’t realize they made a typo and will assume that YOU have a problem.
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Wired News: Publishing for the Little Folks:
“‘(The RedPaper) is a combination of eBay and The New York Times,’ said founder and editor Mike Gaynor. ‘You don’t have to have something valuable in your garage. You just have to have something valuable in your head.’
Backed by software giant Adobe Systems, the RedPaper is an experimental market for information, allowing anyone to publish and sell their writing, be it recipes for muffins or hard-to-get court documents.”
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ClickZ: Do Not Call (But Feel Free to Click):
“Ten million users registered in four days. A few days later, it was 20 million. This past Wednesday, less than a month after registration opened for the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) National Do Not Call Registry, Americans had volunteered 28 million phone numbers, representing over a third of all U.S. households.
What’s equally stunning is 89 percent of these numbers were registered online, making the FTC’s National Do Not Call initiative most probably the most successful site launch. Ever. For two weeks after it went live on June 25, the registry was the most searched-for site on the major search engines, spiking the Nielsen//NetRatings charts.”
That’s correct. In one month 1/3 of US households voted “no” to telemarketing. How hated does an industry have to be before it gets the message that people just don’t want to be sold this way?
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Wired News: Web Cliques Too Cool for School:
“A clique has several mandatory structural elements, which include About, Rules, Members and Codes sections. In general, a clique will clearly define its topic. Its rules section lays out the governing principles of the page, and its membership section lists links to many on-topic sites. In the codes section, small graphical or text-based buttons that link back to the original clique are presented for all member sites to post on their pages.”
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The rhetoric around spam and “finding a solution” to the spam problem is reaching fever pitch. One of the best discussions of the issue I’ve seen is being conducted by the Technology Review.
They started their coverage with an excellent overview of the issue called “Spam Wars”
This was followed by a Dialog between Vipul Ved Prakash (Cloudmark founder), David Crocker and Barry Shein.
I was going to quote from Vipul and David, but they make so many solid points and argue the case for restraint in dealing with spam so eloquently that I will just urge you to follow the links.
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Good Experience – Top Sites’ User Experience Teams and Their Challenge:
“In the long run, companies must ‘bake it into their DNA.’ Customer experience work, if taken to the logical conclusion, eventually reforms the company’s entire organization around the customer’s needs – not around business units and sales channels.
If this seems daunting, remember the good news: even the best websites in the world are dealing with this issue. Now is a good time to engage this issue within your company.”
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Looks like the DMA is up to it’s old (embarrassing) tricks again:
DMNews.com: “Ahhh, so that’s what spam is”:
“Spam is essentially e-mail that misrepresents an offer or misrepresents the originator, or in some way attempts to confuse or defraud people,” DMA president/CEO H. Robert Wientzen said in an appearance on a July 13 spam segment on “CBS Sunday Morning.” “The reality is that, in spite of all the trouble that e-mail is causing, Americans and people all over the world … do respond to e-mail offers, and they often respond to offers for things they didn’t even know existed, from people they didn’t know existed.”
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Wired has a nice little personal profile of one-man media empire Rafat Ali.
Wired News: “Blogging for Bucks”
Rafat runs paidcontent.org which is a great site you should add to your “must read” list.
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Wired News: Making Friendsters in High Places:
“Friendster, the popular social-networking service that cleverly assimilates real-life social groups into a large virtual network, just keeps getting bigger.
The service, which opened to the public in March and is still in beta, will hit 1 million users this week, and is expanding at a rate of 20 percent a week, according to the company.”
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Loudeye is providing the backend for buy.com’s new music download service reports internet.com: “All The iMusic You Can Buy.com”:
“For Seattle-based Loudeye, the move by e-tailers into the music subscription business provides a ready-made market for its new Loudeye Media Framework, which is styled as a single source for developing and integrating digital music purchases, music subscriptions, audio and video players, music and video channels, and music samples including meta data and cover art.
Like the online personals space, where companies like Spring Street Networks have found a gold mine in powering matchmaking services for third party sites, Loudeye wants to be the engine that hums behind every paid music download on the Internet.
In addition to Buy.com, components of the Loudeye Media Framework are being used by Amazon.com, AOL, Apple iTunes, Barnes and Noble, MSN and Windows Media, MusicNet, PressPlay and Yahoo.”
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By the way, once you know all the rules of communicating online, there is nothing wrong with breaking the rules if you have a reason to do so. Of course the risk of failure when you deliberately go against people’s expectations is far greater, so proceed with caution.
I call these sites that successfully walk this line “the rule breakers” (original, yes?).
Here’s today’s Rule Breaker:
Art, humour, and personal sites tend to fair better than corporate sites when it comes to rule breaking. For web zen, minimalism is taken to an extreme and many of the things we expect on a corporate site have been stripped away for zen-like simplicity.
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More interesting analysis of the ramifications of Yahoo’s purchase of Overture:
CNET News.com: “Yahoo finds itself in search spotlight”
“Yahoo for now will face off most directly with Google, but analysts said the wild card will likely be Microsoft. MSN is Overture’s biggest partner, delivering as much as one-third of Overture’s revenue this year, or an estimated $350 million. As a result, many industry watchers say that it is only a matter of time before MSN takes stock of its alternatives, including replacing Overture with Google on its Web sites and hastening efforts to build its own Web search technology.”
It will be interesting to watch a three-way fight over the next year or two. But don’t be fooled, new contenders can still rise up from nowhere. Three years ago we wouldn’t have been imagined that Yahoo would be fighting an upstart called Google in a few years.
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