Coming up the curve.... The three stages of blog awareness. (Via Dave Winer.) [Blogads.org -- where money meets the blog]

 

IAR: E-Mail Coalition Announces False-Positive Forum

The Network Advertising Initiative's (NAI) new e-mail service provider coalition Tuesday announced it would collect examples of how ISPs' stringent e-mail filters scoop up legitimate messages instead of spam.

The initiative will set up an "I_Did_Not_Get_My-E-Mail" forum on Yahoo! Groups, where consumers can express their frustrations with overly aggressive filtering. It is meant to draw attention to the e-mail marketing industry's contention that blunt tactics in the war on spam are having widespread unintended consequences, affecting more than just marketing messages.

Sounds like it's a good idea, except that smart spammers will probably lurk for good ideas.

[MarketingFix]

NewMediaAge: IAB raps email marketers for not joining in survey

The IAB has criticised the email marketing industry for not giving figures to its annual ad spend study.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is sending a draft of the 2002 figures to the IAB within the next 10 days, but many in the industry believe the results will significantly underestimate the true total spent by brands on digital media.

Well, email marketers have no one but themselves to blame with the numbers come in low for their sector.

[MarketingFix]

Business 2.0: "The Blogger hosting service will become faster and more reliable when it's moved to Google servers, and millions of people who have never given a thought to blogs will be exposed to them when they visit Google." [Scripting News]

Kevin Burton just came out with Newsmonster. He explains:

NewsMonster is an advanced weblog manager, reputation system, micropayment economy, and semantic web application. NewsMonster allows the user to keep track of news and use reputation within the blogging community to help discover track of news and use reputation within the blogging community to help discover new weblogs, important articles, and other compelling relationships.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

News Monster and Distributed Reputation.

Developer Kevin Burton has released a beta version of an RSS-based blog/news aggregator called News Monster, a standards-compliant system with a distributed reputation system, a user-managed trust network of worthy bloggers, so that News Monster users will be able to find articles that are getting attention in their virtual neighborhood. The plan is to develop a reputation network called Blognet before the release of beta 2. Blognet will provide infrastructure for a lightweight p2p network that supports node linkage and ad-hoc service delivery. The network will be based on RSS 1.0 and Burton's mod_subscription module. Later versions of the software will also include among its features a Distributed Payment Protocol, a payment reinforcement mechanism based on reputation. The DPP creates a feedback loop within the community in order to reward patrons who donate funds towards worthy causes.

[Smart Mobs]

Information collection tools like this are appearing and will shortly become a standard part of browsers and possibly email clients. I predict that the future of business to business information (and a spam-free environment) will be based on news/information aggregators and blogs (webogs).

Blog-thinking and blog methodology already includes information collection and aggregating combined with added commentary by the blogger. Business-blogs will take this information distribution to a higher level of communication and interexchange with their peospects and customers.

As business end-users discover the power of easily annotating and making use of (syndicating) the information that they discover and collect online, the use of information aggregators and information distributors (blogs/weblogs) will be become as commonplace as email...and, possibly, much more beneficial.

John Lawlor - Boca Raton, FL 2003-02-21

The Spam Reply You Want to Actually Send

This is quite a chuckle:

The Brooklyn resident recently posted an "automatic business reply generator" on his games site, Flooble.com, giving Web surfers a witty answer to the notorious Nigerian spam scam. The generator lets people enter the name, title and other details about the sender's saga in order to create a customized, tongue-in-cheek response that perfectly skewers the officious tone of the well-known e-mail fraud.

"I would appreciate you getting back to me at your earliest convenience to let me know why you, and the estate of your esteemed Father, are more worthy of my aid than Mr. Chuichui Boondwaka Jr.," part of the letter reads, in all mock-seriousness. [_Go_]

[The FuzzyBlog!]

TE>

With Google -- the site that everyone you know visits every day -- sponsoring a blogging tool and hosting service, blogging could now become as mainstream as sending e-mail...

The Blogger hosting service will become faster and more reliable when it's moved to Google servers, and millions of people who have never given a thought to blogs will be exposed to them when they visit Google. The intense bloggers, that small group of correspondents who seem to sit in front of their computers posting all day and all night, have begun the expected insular conversation about what this means for them. I expect that what it means for them, more than anything else, is that they are about to get a lot more company. Some bloggers have carved pleasant, comfortable niches for themselves that are about to get challenged. That might not be great news for the individual bloggers affected, but it's great news for the many thousands of blogs that will be born as a result of this development.

He goes on:

There have been some early rumblings in the blogging community, which tends to value speedy postings over considered ones, about whether Google's purchase of Pyra will lead to Blogger-created or Blogspot-hosted blogs somehow getting preference over those created using different authoring tools (like Radio Userland and LiveJournal). I have no idea what Google plans to do, but the examples of previous new services from the company (like Google News and Google Groups) suggest that it is maniacal about delivering "pure" results. Other early rumblings have centered on the notion of including blog postings in the Google News service.

This would further tear down the wall between "professional" and "amateur" reporting. Depending on your point of view, this prospect is either very exciting or the end of legitimate news. Either way, it will be fun.

He's certainly right about the walls coming down.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]