Month: March 2003

March 31, 2003

  • Thought

    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.

March 25, 2003

March 21, 2003

  • Thought

    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.

March 20, 2003

  • Thought

    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.

  • Thought

    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.

  • Thought

    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 “[email protected]” 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.

March 19, 2003

  • Thought

    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!).

  • Thought

    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?

March 12, 2003

  • Thought

    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)

March 11, 2003

  • Thought

    “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.

  • Thought

    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 “encyclopedia by consensus” where anyone can add or edit an article on anything. While this sounds ridiculous when heard for the first time, the logic explained by the replies to critics page makes some good points.

  • Thought

    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.”

March 10, 2003

March 8, 2003

  • Thought

    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.

March 7, 2003

  • Thought

    This InternetRetailer.com article on eBags.com moving more of their marketing budget to search listings is fairly typical of what we are seeing happening with online marketing. I’ve long preached “context is the only way” for online advertising.

    People are task driven online and want to reach some goal. If you can align advertising with the goal of the user, you will benefit them, and yourself. This strategy is what’s behind the success of search engine links like Google’s Adwords. Because the ads are in context and can be considered largely “content” on the page (i.e. the ads match what the user asked to see) they are more effective at moving the user to their goal and therefore more effective for the marketer because the marketer’s message is actually wanted by these users. This has to be more effective then distracting people from their task because they meet some demographic or interest expectation in the marketer’s mind — “I’ll promote the new Malibu on this mom’s site because women visit that site and they’re my target market”. Or worse yet, just distracting anyone that stops by because the CPC deal lets you blanket the net with pop-ups.

    I’m watching for a major overhaul of online marketing towards context and tight alignment with content over the next few years. I’ve been calling for this since 1997 but with Google and Overture showing people what it looks like in reality, it may finally catch on.

March 6, 2003

  • Thought

    Here is the brief article Chris Daniels wrote for Marketing Magazine wrote about my resignation from AIMS:

    “Schafer Resigns As AIMS President”

    March 5, 2003

    After just a year as the first paid president of the Association of Internet Marketing & Sales (AIMS) Ken Schafer has stepped down from the organization he helped create.

    Schafer says he wants to return to his roots of “creating great online ventures,” such as he did when he started his career spearheading the first online initiative for Sony Music Canada. He has no immediate plans, but says he will consider his options over the next several weeks.

    Schafer was made the organization’s first paid employee about a year ago. His move to a paid position from a volunteer one was part of a larger initiative to move the non-profit organization to a paid membership model, which was implemented this past September. Schafer co-founded AIMS-which now boasts over 4,500 members across the country-in 1996.

    AIMS will continue to be operated by its five-person board of directors. A new president is expected to be hired in the coming months.

    Thanks to Chris and Marketing for allowing me to reprint this.

  • Thought

    A few weeks ago I was watching City-TV here in Toronto and an ad came on for the Ford Focus. Nothing unusual about that, but what was unusual was the now familiar “i” logo for accessing interactive TV options that appeared during the ad. The interactive screen that came up overtop of the Focus ad after I pressed select on my digital remote asked me if I was looking for “fun”, “convenience”, “economy” or some such list and after making a selection the next screen asked if I would like to get a brochure on the Ford Focus. I clicked “yes” and the screen said thanks. End of interaction.

    Yesterday I got a really nice package in the mail from Ford that included the promised brochure along with an offer of a free gift if I went to a dealer for a test drive. They referenced the generic ford.ca site in the introductory letter and mentioned that I could “build my own Focus” and get pricing at the site.

    This to me was a great example of tying together iTV, Direct Mail, dealer-level walk-in generation, and the web into one well-executed campaign.

    If you know more about this particular campaign, especially how successful it has been for Ford, I’d love to hear from you.

  • “Doing Something” About Spam

    There is a growing urge amongst everyone using the Internet to “do something” about spam.

    The growing frustration with spam has lead to more consumer and corporate anti-spam filtering technologies. “ESPs” (E-mail Service Providers) are legitimately afraid that false positives by these filters are going to decrease the overall effectiveness of e-mail as a communications tool. And ISPs are getting very tired of the costs associated with the massive amount of unwanted messages that they have to deliver.

    Following behind the host of technical solutions to spam are the interest groups and task force groups being set up to represent the interests of each group.

    For example, the ESPs have set up a group via the NAI. And now standards body the IETF has set up the Anti-Spam Research Group to research technical solutions, some of which this CNET article says make take years to implement — because fighting spam may mean a fundamental change to the way e-mail works.

    JamSpam appears to be looking for a holistic approach, recognizing that all involved (okay with exception of the spammers) have legitimate concerns and the only solutions that will work are ones that recognize everyone’s issues.

    I have two big concerns in this rush to action:

    1. ISPs have taken it upon themselves to determine what is and is not wanted e-mail. That means that things that people legitimately want and senders have legitimate reason to send, are not being delivered by ISPs. While everyone can sympathize that they get more mail than they want to handle and that this is driving up their costs, they need to let the user decide what is wanted and what is not. Imagine of the Postal Service decided it had too much mail and these LL Bean catalogues seem to be in the mail far too often so they decided to dump them all in a big recycle bin.

    2. The other big issue as I see it is the amorphous definition of “spam” itself. Many people now think of spam as ALL marketing messages, or ALL messages from businesses, or ANY message that they are not interested in. And because people have been given the dubious advice to “never unsubscribe from spam” because it will beget more spam, we now have a situation where legitimate mailing lists have hundreds of subscribers who are submitting them to spam filters rather than use the standard unsubscribe feature to get off the list.

March 4, 2003

  • Stepping Down From AIMS

    Given the AIMS Announcement that is going Tuesday morning, there will most likely be a few more visitors here than usual. If you’re new — welcome! Take a moment and subscribe to A Piece Of My Mind while you’re here.

    Right now there is a mad dash to get everything in place for the Tuesday event and to put the finishing touches on transition work, so I don’t have much time to post right now, but I promise that, starting March 10th, I’ll be posting here regularly as I have in the past.

    AIMS has been a major rush and I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished, but it has also been an incredible drain on me personally and professionally. AIMS became a 24 hour non-stop whirlwind over the last year and it hasn’t left me much time or energy for other important things I’ve been meaning to get to — like this blog.

March 1, 2003

  • Thought

    Your web experience is your brand.

    This ClickZ article uses Google as an example of the user experience trumping all the fancy graphics and flash intros that people think equal brand online.

    I must agree.