Monday, February 04, 2002As the issue of spam seems to creep higher on regulators' and the industry's priority lists, the Direct Marketing Association issues guidelines for its members. Opt-out is bullshit!
But the guidelines do spell out several lesser, but still significant, points. In each e-mail, marketers must provide information for recipients on how to opt out of receiving future mailings, and they also must allow consumers to halt the sale, exchange or rental of their addresses. Marketers must also disclose and provide opt-out information for sold, rented or exchanged consumer information.
Commercial e-mails must disclose the marketer's identity, and the subject line should be "clear, honest, and not misleading." The e-mail also should provide offline contact information (including a street address) for consumer inquiries, either within the message body, or via a link to the marketer's Web site.
Marketers also must "scrub" rented or purchased e-mail lists using the DMA's e-Mail Preference Service suppression file -- a "do not call" database for e-mail marketers.
OK, what's the URL of the web interface for that database??? More on this later.
[Via internetnews.com: Top News]
The Next Turn of the Wheel
The currency of blogging communities is awareness. It flows within these communities, and increasingly (thanks to RSS channels and cross-posting APIs) it flows across them, too. This mode of communication can resemble e-mail, yet differs from e-mail in ways that are important but hard to describe. Nevertheless, I'll try. E-mail is a message addressed to a person or group, whereas blogging is a message addressed to a space. The relationship of people to spaces is many-to-many, and fluid. Blogging communities wired together with publish/subscribe technology form knowledge networks, and the people joined to those networks are the routers. What happens in a network whose routing function is governed by human intelligence? Lots of people, me included, expect powerful emergent behaviors. But we won't know until the phenomenon reaches critical mass. Getting us there is UserLand's unwavering mission, and with Radio 8 the company has taken another big step forward.
Jon Udell in Byte.
What Software Do You Think In?
One of the things I've learned about my partners at Adaptive Path is that we tend to 'think in' different forms of software. Janice is all about Excel--she can spreadsheet most anything. For Jesse, it's BBEdit. Jeff seems to favor vi and pine. Pour ma part, je pense en xml ou en outlines, et mon outliner favori est celui de ms-office (word ou powerpoint).
[Via peterme]
RDF is a standard for describing resources on the web. This guide contains links to many RDF resources including examples, documents, software, tools and projects that use it. Ca fait un bout de temps que je veux approfondir ma connaissance de RDF, ca me semble un bon point de départ...
2001 InfoWorld Technology of the Year
Webservices, XML, 802.11, p2p, 64bits, portals, CRM, NAS, DB, handhelds...
Xerces 2 for Java, the Apache XML Project's second generation XML parser, has now finished its beta phase and is considered production quality
[Via xmlhack]
What are the risks of running an Open Source Project? Every maintainer of an Open Source project will always have issues that she/he needs to mitigate all the time. What is the best way to do it?
[Via NewsForge: Open Source News]
