07.15.04
Posted in General
at 8 am
See that diagram at Textura Design? That’s mine. One of a set of 6 that have been very helpful in communicating how the rooms are to be laid out. How am I supposed to collect royalties tho?
At least this entry is a little more interesting than the one I had in mind. The one that said “WebVisions” over and over again… That was going to be titled “BrainDump”
Permalink
07.12.04
Posted in General
at 3 pm
If you want to risk it, you can e-mail me a ‘rolson’ at the new gmail.com service. I got one through my blogger subscription which I use to update the news feeds at Bad-Seed.org and some other places.
I do like how they bucked the InterCap trend and went with a simple Initialcap.
Permalink
07.10.04
Posted in General
at 12 am
Well that’s cool. It looks like a blogger I’ve been reading for a number of years is showing up at WebVisions.
Cam’s Upcoming Travel Schedule
When I first saw this I had to double check the conference site to see if he was speaking. I’m pretty sure he’s presented elsewhere, but I hadn’t seen his name on the materials so. That said, I wouldn’t have put it past Nick Finck to get Cam to fly out from NY for this.
Permalink
07.09.04
Posted in General
at 8 pm
The Deliverability Top Ten
By Chip House, ExactTarget
- Get and Confirm Permission Receiving permission from your subscribers is the crux of a successful email program. Capturing an opt-in and confirming it with a follow-up email is the best practice to ensure you only add recipients that want your email. To find out if you are sending something that is unwanted, look at your email from the eyes of your recipients. Will they anticipate receiving the email? Does it contain information that interests them? If the answer is “no,” then you should not send it. It is likely to get filtered due to complaints or content and will cause harm to your deliverability, as well as your brand and profitability over time.
- Send Highly Valuable & Highly Relevant Emails As the inbox gets more crowded with spam, your users are looking to your email to provide them with relevant content – the content they expected when subscribing to receive your email in the first place. The age of email blasting is over. Begin capturing data on your subscribers via surveys or during sign-up. Over time you will be able to send more relevant content, which lessens the chance that your email will be interpreted as spam by your subscribers.
- Set Content & Frequency Expectations Nothing can trigger subscriber dissatisfaction like continued emails that do not meet subscriber expectations in terms of content or frequency. Did you promise valuable, informational content, but continue to send only product pitches? Did you promise a monthly newsletter, but send weekly promotions? A recent study* shows that 65% of men and 56% of women define spam as “email from a company that I have done business with that comes too often.”
- Use a Service Provider with a Good Reputation Commercial email is getting more difficult with the advent of the CAN-SPAM Act and the increase in ISP filtering. Staying up-to-date on current legislation and policies of ISPs and anti-spam groups is difficult to do on your own. Reputable service providers such as ExactTarget dedicate significant resources to managing ISP relationships, monitoring email deliveries, and evaluating current email laws. If you do not have similar resources or an in-house expert, outsourcing could be the best way to get your messages delivered.
- Use a Recognizable, Short, and Consistent “From Address” Before even opening your email, a user has to recognize you, your company, your publication, and remember that they requested your email. This leads to many users accidentally reporting email that they opted-in to receive as spam or deleting it all together. The email “from address” is the first thing email recipients look at when deciding if they should open a message. It is important to keep this in mind with all email applications, but especially when mailing to AOL since their application only shows the email “from address” (info@example.com) rather than the friendly “from name” (XYZ Company). If your email address looks like this (iqytchg@cz.example.net) you are likely to receive a high number of spam complaints that could result in your email routing to the bulk folder or being blocked completely.
- Ask to be Placed in the Address Book or Safe Senders List AOL 9.0, Yahoo, Hotmail/MSN and Outlook 2003 all remove their email filtering techniques when the sender’s email address is in the recipient’s address book. This is another good reason to keep the same address over time. Once your “from address” is in a subscriber’s book, your emails will continue to reach the inbox with images and links intact.
- Maintain List Cleanliness One sure way to get your message blocked is by “looking like a spammer.” Most ISPs use list quality filters to detect when a sender is attempting to deliver email to a large number of invalid addresses. These messages “bounce” back to the originating server, which is why they are called bounces. Filtering can start at a bounce rate of just 10% at many ISPs. Even a good, permissionbased list will see bounces over time. Per Return Path, an average email list will lose 30% of its names each year due to subscribers changing email addresses. To stay clean, monitor your bounces on a regular basis and remove bad addresses from your list.
- Promptly Remove Unsubscribes and Respond to Complaints No matter the quality of your opt-in efforts, some subscribers will not want to receive your email any longer. Nothing will cause more problems for your deliverability than ignoring unsubscribes and complaints. It is also important to manage your reply email address so that manual requests can be removed and complaints can be monitored. Monitoring your complaints closely is an effective indicator of how clearly you informed your subscribers regarding content and frequency when they opted-in to your publications. In the age of CAN-SPAM, it must be easy for users to manage their subscriptions or unsubscribe. A profile management form allows a user to select the publications to which they want to subscribe to or be removed from. This enables you to stay in compliance with the 10-day unsubscribe removal period mandated by CAN-SPAM, while still offering another option besides unsubscribing from all of your communications.
- Use ISP Inbox Testing Setting up an “ISP Test List” can be a fast and easy way to find out if your email will pass through spam filters. You can do so by simply setting up email accounts with the major ISPs such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Before sending to your entire subscriber list, send to your “test list” and make sure your email reaches the inbox of each ISP. If it lands in a bulk folder or is blocked all together, you are then able to investigate and make the appropriate changes.
- Avoid “Spammy” Words and Phrases Systematically scanning email subject lines and body content (also called content filtering) is the most widely used filtering method among ISPs.** Avoid overly promotional words and phrases, multiple exclamation points, all capital letters and other text often used by spammers.
*DoubleClick, 2003
**Jupiter Research
Permalink
07.06.04
Posted in General
at 11 pm
For Tim, Boris, Randy, et al.:
Look at what Dave Hyatt is saying this way: On the Mac platform there are a few real-time compositing graphic languages: DisplayPostscript/Quartz, QuickDraw, OpenGL. Windows has DirectX and such, right?
Apple is adding a new one: HTML/CSS/JS. This isn’t about extensions for the web, it’s about giving Mac developers the ability to composite on screen in a highly accessible language. This is for the Mac Platform, not the Web Platform.
And, adding additional non-standard extensions to Safari and WebCore/WebKit is *much* different for Apple than it was for Netscape or Microsoft for two reasons: A) Apple has been adhering closer and getting better compatibility with published W3C standards and this development has not apparently made much of an impact in delivering this, B) Apple and Safari are not in a position of complete or near-complete market dominance. Without the network effect that an overriding incumbent would have, proprietary functions are exactly that: Proprietary… to only be used on the Mac.
However I think Dave might start framing the talk around what extensions have been added to “WebCore/WebKit” rather than Safari.
Permalink
Posted in General
at 3 pm
This week’s Pete Schulberg’s column in the Portland Tribune sneaks in to great references. One is the OPB “Bridging World History” project that we’ve been working on for 9 months or so, and at the end of the column there’s a quick mention of our Web Visions event, on Jully 16th.
Seats are filling fast but there’s still time to get to this conference!
Permalink
07.04.04
Posted in General
at 7 pm
Came across this the other day… It may have been via BoingBoing as usual. It’s a tutorial on throwing poker cards to the extent that they can cause bodily harm.
As with throwing most objects, the technique to get it to work right involves getting the spin just right.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
07.02.04
Posted in General
at 9 am
Do you remember these net.fads?
10. Jay Maynard
9. Mahir Cagri
8. Tourist Guy
7. Hampsterdance
6. Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!
5. People Falling Down
4. Bonsai Kitten
3. All Your Base
2. Bubb Rubb
1. Star Wars Kid
Not a complete list by any means but certainly a good sampling.
Permalink
06.30.04
Posted in General
at 10 pm
“I’m sorry dear. I know you’re my husband and all, but I had sex with my 14-year-old student. I know you’re upset so here’s an iPod.”
Permalink
Posted in General
at 10 pm
In the words of Kyle’s Mom…
“wha-wha-wha-WHAT??!?”
If I’m reading this post at cubicgarden.com correctly, it looks like Apple will be putting a Jabber server into OS X 10.4 “Tiger” Server.
Points to remember here: Jabber is cool, open source IM that’s better than IRC.
Jabber server is a pain in the ass to A) install and B) maintain. Having OS X with this installed means that pains A and B are probably going to be resolved.
Jabber has ‘transports’ which are gateways to other systems such as AOL/AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc. A Jabber client ‘could’ be attached to any and all of these networks at once. (I’ve had this working a couple of times.)
iChat has “some” Jabber code in it. It’s used for the local area peer-to-peer connections. So this leads to…
iChat able to connect to more than just AIM people? Jabber able to do video chats? hmmm…..
Permalink