Category: FUBAR

Somewhere along the line, it seemed like a good idea. An email newsletter to help promote my busiest site: BigBlueBall.com. I had done it before; starting and stopping without any sort of regularity. But then back in February in a moment of temporary insanity I committed to cranking them out bi-weekly.

It’s not that they are that long, or that so much time goes into pulling them together. But sometimes it’s just a drain on my brain.

Then to put the icing on the cake, I get people — subscribers mind you — that report my humble little newsletter as spam! Not a lot, but for the last issue about 7 reports were received by my email host, Constant Contact.

I hate spam. I get enough of it myself. But I detest being accused of spamming. People signed up for the newsletter. Constant Contact has stringent anti-spam requirements. They are a legitimate email service, and requests to remove yourself from the list are promptly honored.

When someone reports my email as spam, they are automatically and permanently removed from the mailing list. The newsletter has been published every two weeks for the past three months. So by now, folks have been seeing it on a regular basis. In theory, they’ve received several issues before deciding to claim the newsletter is spam. Did they bother to actually read the damn thing?

I’ll keep my eyes propped open for a few more hours and crank out another edition, but with the diminishing returns and the aggravation, I’m not sure how long it will go on. Chris Pirillo over at Lockergnome has been claiming that RSS will overtake email newsletters. Well I’ve had RSS for a while, but the jury is still out on that. I think it’s still too techie for most people.

What do you think? Am I a fool to continue the newsletter?

I finally got an invitation to open a GMail account, thanks to a wonderful friend. If you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past month, GMail is the new web-mail service that Google is testing. When they launch, they promise free email accounts with a whopping 1 GB of storage — enough to keep all your email archives online. In exchange, they will use their AdSense technology to display relevant advertisements next to your email.

AdSense scans the text of the message looking for certain keywords, then displays text ads that match those targeted keywords. The technology was launched about a year ago for website publishers, and in fact, I use it on the BigBlueBall forums and many of my other websites. They are typically the least intrusive form of online advertising I’ve seen, and are usually very effective at displaying ads that are relevant to the content they appear next to.

For some reason, the privacy wonks are having a field day with GMail, declaring it a travesty; a violation of personal privacy. Some nonprofit groups even sent a complaint letter to California attorney general Bill Lockyer, claiming that GMail’s automated keyword bots somehow violate federal wiretap laws.

California State Senator Liz Figueroa, a democrat, is drafting legislation to block Google from offering the service even before they begin, claiming that GMail is “an absolute invasion of privacy.” A quick search through Google news reveals a long list of articles lambasting the proposed service.

I’m a big advocate of personal privacy. But this time, most of the privacy advocates have it all wrong. The risk of privacy invasion is no worse than with any other email provider. All email services — Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL or your local ISP — have the ability to read your email. Unless you encrypt your email (which 99.999% of us do not), your email could be read by someone working for the email provider. For them to do so would be unethical and likely illegal, but it is possible. Yet we trust them to blithely ignore our emails, and assume that the only eyes to see them will be the friends, family or associates we sent them to.

In the case of GMail, people are not reading your email, nor are they creating a mysterious profile of you and your interests. A software program is simply looking for occurrence and frequency of certain words that advertisers think will translate into dollars or euros.

Is it technically possible that Google could extend this technology for a more sinister purpose? Perhaps profiling your interests and then selling your GMail address to spammers? Certainly. But then, so could any email provider. Why am I not concerned? Because if Google or any other email provider ever got caught doing that, it would mark the end of their service.

Customer loyalty is built on service and trust. Google has both by the truckloads, but if word got out that they were the bad guy, their fortunes would disappear before you could say “dot-com-bust.” And remember, this is an optional service. Spooked by privacy concerns? Then don’t sign up.

Meanwhile, I’m having fun with my new GMail account. Feel free to reach out and email me: jeff.hester[at]gmail.com

I invested some time in my daughter today. Her Human Hereditary and Evolution class required a trip to the Museum of Man in San Diego’s Balboa Park. I went along to keep her company, unplug for a while and enjoy the beauty of Balboa Park.

The exhibit she was studying dealt with human evolution. I’m not uninterested in the subject, but after two hours, I had consumed more than I cared about the ancestry of our species. The most interesting part dealt with the future evolution of man. We already have battery-operated mechanical hearts, cochlear implants and hip replacements. Why not install upgrades, like Lee Majors in The Six Million Dollar Man. “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.”

Robo-sapiens. Personally, I’d dig a few upgrades. But I digress.

After two hours of milling about the museum, I’d had my fill. We bought a book that went along with the exhibit, and headed to downtown’s Gas Lamp Quarter for lunch. The weather was warm and sunny, so we ate outdoors. Afterwards, I continued my good father role, smiling and practicing my patience as she shopped for clothes at Nordstroms. Thankfully she’s picky; the excursion only cost me a pair of earrings.

It was a beautiful day. Note to self: I must repeat, often.

RADIO VOX POPULI is one of the more unusual projects I’ve run across, thanks to a friendly comment posted by Etanisla. The project reads blog entries using text-to-speech technology, scanning blog entries and giving you a sampling of blogs you would otherwise never know about. Apparently including the one you’re now reading.

The voices are very obviously computer-generated, but it’s still interesting.

One observation after a casual listening: there’s a lot of angst in those blogs!