Sunday, February 05, 2006

Man Convicted of Masterminding U.S.S. Cole Attack Escapes Jail [New York Times: International News] 8:18:39 PM    comment []

'Certified' email. 'Certified' email: The blogoshere is exploding over AOL and Yahoo's plans (and here) to offer marketers (and presumably, media companies and others) to pay a fee to allow email marketing (the "permission" kind that customers have requested) to detour past the spam filters of their email services. Most of the response seems to be outrage and writing off of email marketing. I don't understand the problem. If people subscribe to something and they want to receive it, I don't see any problem in their advertising-supported free email services offering marketers a paid-option to guarantee its delivery. Please remember, the AOL or Yahoo! email account user has already signed onto an email service that serves up flashing banner ads all around the email one is reading. That AOL and Yahoo! would charge those same advertisers a fee to help speed up a marketing message to customers who have subscribed to their advertising seems completely logical to me. It's not like the users of AOL or Yahoo! are being forced to subscribe to the advertising- email or use the advertising-supported "free" email services of AOL or Yahoo!. There is a world of options out there if you don't like what they're doing. Technorati Tags: advertising [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] 8:18:24 PM    comment []

Meet Jim Wallis, the Chancellor's religious guru. Politics: Who exactly is this American evangelical pastor and why has Gordon Brown agreed to endorse his latest work? [Guardian Unlimited] 11:06:12 AM    comment []

BMW cheats search-engines, Google removes it from search results. Cory Doctorow: BMW's German page has been expunged from Google's search-results, apparently in retaliation for BMW's use of sleazy "doorway pages" that display different content to search-engine crawlers in order to fool them into valuing those pages more highly. A Google employee has confirmed the "Google Death Penalty" for BMW on his blog. This willingness to punish wrongdoing even when it comes from big companies is a marked contrast with the anti-virus companies that had to be arm-twisted into releasing updates to their products to catch and remove the spyware and rootkits that Sony music was caught distributing on millions of music CDs. It appears that at least some of the JavaScript- redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google's webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We'll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded. I'm leaving comments turned off on this post; there are no doubt plenty of other search engine optimization areas to discuss this. Link (via Digg) [Boing Boing] 11:05:41 AM    comment []

Reading File: In Academia, Big Brains, Empty Pockets. "The Ph.D. Glut Revisited," by Gary North, looks at the relationship between getting a doctorate and making money. [NYT > Education] 11:05:21 AM    comment []

Betty Friedan, R.I.P.. “[T]he feminist crusader and author whose searing first book, The Feminine Mystique, ignited the contemporary women's movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world, died yesterday, her 85th birthday, at her home in Washington.” (New York Times) Technorati tags: Friedan feminism [Follow Me Here...] 11:04:43 AM    comment []

HOWTO send emails that get responses. Guy Kawasaki -- entrepreneur and venture capitalist -- has written a great 12-point article giving tips for email senders. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, since sending and recieving email takes up about 70 percent of my working day. # Don't FUQ (Fabricate Unanswerable Questions), I. Many people send emails that are unanswerable. If your question is only appropriate for your psychiatrist, mother, or spouse, then ask them, not your recipient. When I get this type of message I go into a deep funk: (a) Should I just not answer? But then the person will think I'm an arrogant schmuck; (b) Should I just give a cursory answer and explain that it's not answerable? (c) Should I carefully craft a heartfelt message probing for more information so that I can get into the deep recesses of the sender's mind and begin a long tail of a message thread that lasts two weeks? Usually, I pick option (b). # Don't FUQ, II. There's one more type of unanswerable message: the open-ended question that is so broad it should be used in a job interview at Google. For example, “What do you think of the RIAA lawsuits?” “What kind of person is Steve Jobs?” “Do you think it's a good time to start a company?” My favorite ones begin like this: “I haven't given this much thought, but what do you think about...?” In other words, the sender hasn't done much thinking and wants to shift responsibility to the recipient. Dream on. The purpose of email is to save time, not kill time. You may have infinite time to ask essay questions but don't assume your recipient does. Link (via Hawk Wings) Previously: HOWTO write ass-kicking emails and get a response HOWTO decode the numbers at the front of Best Buy stores.  Best Buy stores sport large boards with mysterious numbers on them; it turns out that they refer to how much shoplifting is going on in the store, how it has fared at selling Sports Illustrated subscriptions, extended warranties and credit-cards. These are apparently in place to motivate employees to do better. The author of Cabel's Blog LOL prised the information out of various Best Buy cashiers, and has posted a codex so that we can intelligently discuss each store's success at peddling easy credit with its employees. Shrink Percent: Ahh, shrink. You probably call it "stealing". And this store is doing pretty good with handling it. The shrink percentage is, presumably, the percentage of Best Buy merchandise that is simply prancing right out the door. A shrink percentage of .50% is, apparently, bad news — so this store is doing pretty well. Shrink Payout: Keep shrink low, and the shrink payout increases! Well, I have no idea how this shrink payout ($469) is distributed to employees (anyone know?), but I'd wager it winds up being a few extra dollars in your paycheck every now and then. Link (via Consumerist) [Boing Boing] 11:04:35 AM    comment []