Derek Scruggs

Mark Wyner offers and awesome overview of how to make CSS work (most of the time) in email.

Business Know How has a good article explaining Yahoo’s controversial (and confusing) SiteMatch program. I haven’t spent a lot of time reviewing this program, but my sense is that this smacks of misplaced arrogance. Yahoo generates a fair amount of traffic, but not anywhere near what Google does, and therefore not enough to charge a premium. This is kind of like Apple charging for their browser even though Microsoft’s is free. Apple would never do that because it’s a short trip to oblivion.

Yahoo may get away with this for a little while, but marketers measure their ROI better than ever. If the amortized cost per click for a Yahoo campaign does not measure up to Google, guess who’s going to get more money in the long run?

Well, it’s about time. Yahoo recently launched an RSS aggregator, and it’s not bad. It allows me to have my favorite feeds right on the My Yahoo home page, which has been my home page for a few years now. Once they get the glitches out, I hope Yahoo pushes the envelope in terms of user interface. Given their success with consumer-focused services, I have high hopes.

This is a very important step. Now it’s only a matter of time before MSN, AOL, Earthlink etc. jump on the bandwagon. Which means that my prototypical mainstream user – aka my mom – will very likely be using RSS regularly sometime in 2005. Woo hoo!

Talk about morons, here’s the prototype. This article takes Google to task for planning to introduce an email service. The writer assumes it will be a free webmail service a la Hotmail. I really really really doubt it. Rather, my guess is that Google plans to allow email publishers to introduce AdSense ads in their newsletters, something many have been calling for. If so, Google has actually found an excellent niche that makes them stand out from Yahoo, MSN et al.

This is fascinating. Fred Langa of Information Week did an interesting test that suggests a lot of legitimate email is being blocked as spam.

This is almost depressing. I really really really hate spam, but this article is a sad reminder of how the legitimate marketing babies like you and me can get thrown out with the spammer bathwater. Or at least pay a huge fine.

Excellent interview with Seth Godin. Strictly speaking, I probably owe Seth a link for the good deed he did for me back in the summer, but I’ve read tons of interviews with him and this probably the best I’ve seen. You know, at one time I thought Permission Marketing was his 15 minutes, but now I realize that he continually makes important observations and will thus be around for a long time.

If you’ve never had a chance to see him speak, make the effort. Also, check out Really Bad Powerpoint and you’ll understand why his presentations are so good.

Re: Why the Web Will Kill RSS

I’m in the middle of the road. I think email still has legs, but once I started using NewsGator I immediately saw a better future. Subscribing to a feed is trivially easy – you don’t have to input an email address, type in a URL or anything. Just right-click the XML icon and you’r done. It will soon get even easier because the aggreagtor community is close to agreeing on a subscription standard (it will be very similar to a mailto: link). From the publisher’s side, compare that to hooking up an opt-in form, confirming subscriptions etc.

I find that more and more I wish all sites had RSS feeds so I could passively “keep in touch” with them. I do that not because I am the site’s “biggest fan” but rather the opposite – I’m interested in what they offer, but not interested enough to fill out a form and risk being spammed later.

NewsGator only works with Outlook, but other email client developers would be foolish not to add the same functionality. AOL now offers blogs – I suspect an integrated RSS aggregator is not far behind. Ditto Yahoo and Hotmail (check out Oddpost for a preview of the future). Microsoft has to be thinking of buying NewsGator – several bloggers who work for Microsoft have mentioned it as a great tool. Not just for blog feeds – RSS is useful for things like getting notices from source code management tools.

And that is why RSS will continue to gain traction – it can be extended a million different ways in much the same way a browser can be extended via plugins. Email clients are devolving because of viruses – the new Outlook turns off HTML by default. Meanwhile, RSS is evolving to support more complex concepts such as delivery of mp3s and other rich media. When’s the last time you advised a publisher to send an attachment to its list? For that matter, when’s the last time you saw something truly new with email?

Much like the browser in 1994-1999, all the innovation right now is in RSS. Maybe it won’t replace email per se, but neither did email replace direct mail. An awful lot of marketers and publishers are glad they came to the email game early before the riff raff overwhelmed the medium. Likewise, now is the time to join the RSS revolution.

And a worm is much less likely to be spread by RSS. (I’d say it’s impossible, but never say never…)

The long arm of the law appears to be on the side of Gator.