At the turn of the millennia, Digital Deliverance LLC began publishing a paid-subscription printed newsletter (the recession later killed it). In retrospect, we can state it used a media business model of the waning Industrial Era to provide advice about the…
R.I. P. Mark Schwed (1955-2008). Good Guy. Great entertainment journalist. Former colleage.
Congratulations for the Gannett corporate staff for selecting — after more than three years of deliberations— an e-mail publishing vendor for USA Today and for all Gannett newspapers and TV stations in North America. Gannett’s ‘quick’ selection is significant for two reasons:…
What if the crime of Breaking & Entering into your home were illegal only if the perpetrator wore a mask? Imagine if Breaking & Entering into your home were legal if the perpetrator didn’t wear a mask. Now imagine that we’re not…
“In case you missed any of these important stories, here are the Top 10 Most Read Articles from our Campaign 2004 section for the month of July (as of 11 a.m. ET, July 28).” So says the greeting on this e-mail from…
DoubleClick’s analysis of e-mail marketing opening rates, click-through rates, order size, and revenues per e-mail during the 1st Quarter of 2004 gives an excellent example of why we think that most newspapers and magazines have ‘missed the boat’ by concentrating on Website…
CAN is an auxiliary verb in the English language. It is used to indicate ability. And that was the unintentional irony when the U.S. Congress passed into law the CAN SPAM Act six months ago. Although the legislators thought that the acronym…
E-mail publishing applications service provider CheetahMail has been purchased by credit reporting and business information corporation Experian. CheetahMail started in 1997 as a private spinoff of the newspaper industry’s failed New Century Network (NCN) consortium. CheetahMail initially specialized in providing e-mail publishing…
On the Newspaper Association of America’s Digital Edge Web site, Attorney William Baker offers some basic advice to e-mail publishers about U.S. anti-spam laws. In our experience, the Editorial departments at newspaper, magazines, and broadcasters generally obey anti-spam laws.However, we’ve seen (and…
We thank Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome, who today is attempting to clear up Digital Deliverance’s “deep misunderstandings of the RSS feed and its accomplaying blog technology.” He has been leading a charge that publishers should abandon e-mail publishing in exchange for RSS…
At the beginning of this month, the European Union’s ‘ban on spam’ directive (PDF format) took effect: ‘Cookies’ and other invisible tracking devices that can collect information on Internet users may be utilised only if the user is given clear information about…
There’s a good story today on the front page of The New York Times about how otherwise reputable companies become ‘white collar’ spammers by purchasing and using lists of consumers’ e-mail addresses. If you’ve provided your persona demographic information and registered to…
Brian Peddle of SavedByZero.org discusses possible ways to track readers of Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds. It certainly won’t beat an e-mail subscriber list and e-mail open/clickthrough tracking as ways to know who reads your content.
InsightExpress found that 85 percent of the 1,500 U.S. online consumers it interviewed disagree with the Direct Marketing Association’s various pro-marketing definitions of spam: 43 percent agreed that “Any unsolicited e-mail message, commercial or ogtherwise, is spam.” Another 18 percent agreed that…
Last month, a posting on the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits site highlighted a marketing newsletter report (which the newsletter has since put behind a paid access archive) that unpublished parts of a Quris study of 1,691 American e-mail users found that 92.3%…
ChannelSeven has an interview with Privacy Consultant Richard M. Smith, who’s now semi-retired. Among other topics, he talks about how much data-mining is actually wasted by marketers: “Web sites and database companies collect an amazing amount of data that isn’t used. One…
SFGate News Director Vlae Kershner has an interesting quote in an Editor & Publisher‘s online interview. Asked why he opposes charging for access to his content: “Newspapers need to charge because they have high production costs and because if they don’t, advertisers…
Cloudmark, which manufactures spam filters for corporations, is hawking an e-mail rating system that it says could solve the problem of ‘False-Positives’ — solicited e-mail that gets caught in spam filters. Nice try, but technological solutions aren’t really going to solve the…
Nokia claims that use of e-mail on mobile phones will grow by 35 percent during the next 18 months. The Register thinks Nokia’s prediction might be somewhat high and quotes an analyst who believe that 10 percent growth would be more realistic.
For more than eight years, Pathfinder.com has been the oxymoron of online publishing. Pathfinder and its parent company, AOL Time Warner (soon to be renamed Time Warner) are the poster children for Mass Media cluelessness about New Media. So, no one should…
The 20% of the Welsh population who actually speak their national language finally have their own online weekly newspaper. Y-Cymro, the weekly newspaper for North Wales, has launched a Web site, an e-mail edition, and a digital edition. “We decided to introduced…
While North American governmental bodies lament the rise of spam, the European Parliament is banning it. Effective in October, the Parliament’s Directive 2002/58/EC [(PDF format)] bans unsolicited commercial e-mail within the European Union countries. The directive, which also applies to unsolicited SMS…
Writing in TechCentralStation: Europe, Sandy Starr reminds that, “… October 2003 is the deadline for implementing the European Commission’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, which dictates that ‘member states shall take appropriate measures to ensure that…unsolicited communications for purposes of direct…
We categorically agree with this interesting quote from Slate.com Editor-in-Chief Jacob Weisberg in a New York Times‘ story (free registration required) about his site making a quarterly profit: “As it turns out, e-mail was the killer application on the Web.”
Today’s
Dozens of applicants to Harvard University didn’t hear ‘You’ve got mail!’ when American Online rejected the university’s e-mails about their acceptance as Harvard students. According to Boston.com, AOL’s e-mail filtering system mistook Harvard’s mass e-mailing as a spam attack and blocked those…
According to a story in The South China Morning Post , Computer Associates and Kaspersky Labs repor that that 90% of computer viruses were transmitted via e-mails. According to MessageLabs, an average of one message in every 300 contains a virus, compared…