Derek Scruggs

Did I tell you? I’m opening up shop in the middle east.

(Props to Dori Smith for finding this gem.)

Online Portals Won’t Defeat Spam – See what I mean? As long as email is purely a cost center, ISPs won’t have much incentive to make the sustained investments necessary to kill spam.

Hans Peter Brondmo says that in order to reduce spam, bulk email senders should be held accountable. He’s one of the founding members of a project called Lumos that supposedly will introduce standards that enforce accountability on the part of legitimate email senders.

I’ve got an easier solution – charge postage. This hand wavy “accountability” stuff won’t hold up in the face of (often bogus, often clueless) Spamcop complaints. ISPs will still receive complaints, and they’ll still have to respond to them. Yeah, spam costs money in terms of bandwidth, but it costs much more in human capital (aka abuse desk personnel). Unless and until bulk senders pay real money to the ISPs (call it postage, call it “assurance of deliverability”) there is still no real financial incentive for ISPs to apply stricter scrutiny to their filtering policies.

Marketers unite to cook spam’s goose
Good luck. I tried implementing a scheme like this a couple of years ago. While there was some interest on the part of marketers, ISPs still distrusted bulk mailers so much that they didn’t give it much attention. This is why companies like Assurance Systems have popped up.

Database and online marketers should take a moment to reflect on the passing of Ted Codd, the genius theorist behind the relational database. I hope Oracle’s Larry Ellison is.

Ohmigod. Did the world just end?

Heh. Over at Executive Summary, Rick is passing along the idea of embedded marketers. I like the idea, but hasn’t the business world already reached its quota on war metaphors?

Bullet Points Kill! Indeed, which is why you should consider buying marketing guru Seth Godin’s Really Bad Powerpoint e-book. I have and it’s got lots of good stuff in it.

The really scary thing is the way PowerPoint affects the way we think, which was explored in a great article in the New Yorker a couple of years ago.

Good customer service as a differentiator? Apparently not in the airline business. It amazes me how clueless this industry is. The clown CEO mentioned in this article thinks Southwest Airlines is a “special case.” Sadly, he’s right. Yes, Southwest has low prices, but everyone I know whose flown Southwest talks about the service first, not the prices. Living in the Denver area, where United has a virtual monopoly, I long for the quality experience I used to get from Southwest when I lived in Chicago (at Midway Airport – United has a huge share of Ohare, too).

United’s service is terrible. I hate flying that airline, but I don’t have much of a choice. When will these guys figure it out?

PS I would be remiss if I didn’t give kudos to Frontier Airlines, which is based in Denver. Though I think Southwest is generally better, Frontier has usally been a quality experience for me, too. If only they had more routes…

People hate popups. So much so that WebCrawler attributes a recent growth spurt to their removal from the WebCrawler site. This doesn’t surprise me – I’d definitely avoid a search site that hammered me with popups.

That said, I think a distinction should be made from mass audience sites like WebCrawler and the typical B2B and B2C sites. Without exception, every client I’ve had has boosted newlsetter subscription rates by using popups. And when they remove the popups, subscription rates go down.

Of course, they can still be annoying, so if you use popups, it’s a good idea to only launch them on the first visit to the site. Cookies are good for this kind of thing.