| LED Digest 1897: Cultivating a Positive Business Rep |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................... November 18, 2004 Issue #1897 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Schedule Comments ==-- ~ Jim ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Conflicts of Interest ==-- ~ Brad Waller ~ Lanell Grant ~ Kevin Jackson --== SMTP Servers & Altering the 'From' Field ==-- ~ Sheryl Coppenger ~ Joe Halbrook ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Why Firefox? ==-- ~ Mike Hardy ~ Derek Andrews ======== NEW ==================================== From: Jim I'm sorry, Adam, but it's really a "no brainer" for me. The "sorry, Adam" is because I'd love to have a three day work schedule myself but I want YOU to work at sending LED five times every week. Not having it two days a week ruins my morning coffee at work two times too many. When you first went to the three times a week schedule I found myself adding more and more cream and sugar to my coffee because something just seemed missing. Then I'd realize I really, really, hated coffee with cream and sugar and spit it out. It was my daily LED I was lacking. I've been gradually adjusting to the reduced schedule and my new therapist keeps telling me not to give up hope, that no one should have to live without hope, so I'm hoping this means you're going back to the full time schedule. (Not that it's all that important to me, but...) Jim ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Brad Waller Subject: Conflicts of interest > [My client's] opposition... saw [their website, which I developed] > and immediately contacted me about designing them a website. > Today my original client rang to say... that he felt I was in a very > bad "conflict of interest" position. - Mark Medlicott, LED 1893 I have to agree with your statement that you are not in the trellis business. Does your first client expect that the newspaper will only accept his ads? Does he expect that a sign maker should refuse to make the signage for all other trellis companies in the city? Or should they be exclusive to the entire country? Where is the limit? I can see their concern, and you can assure them that the sites you create for your clients are unique and that they do not need to worry that you will copy the work you already did. Just make sure you make the sites different, and I can't see the issue. You are in the service business and unless they paid you extra for an exclusive contract, then they have no say whatsoever over other work you do. Brad Waller, VP, Business and Affiliate Development Manage & Sell Site Banner Space: http://adjungle.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Lanell Grant Subject: Conflicts of interest Hi Mark, My two cents.. If you have established any sort of ongoing relationship with your first client then I would say this is a conflict of interest. If your work was a one shot project with no ongoing involvement I would do the competing web site. Some web jobs require a fairly involved situation with the business for which you are designing, as more than basic graphics and implementation are involved. Those on going situations would preclude work for competition... Just my opinion, Lanell Grant ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Kevin Jackson Subject: Conflicts of interest This is an opportunity to show how our industry has matured to the point where we can be regarded in the same way as, for example, a printer. Is there the same concern if competitors use the same print shop? No! There may be however if they use the same print designer, depending on how creative the designer is. Some designers come up with creative ideas all the time, and each one is different. The point here is that a good website involves several different disciplines, and there is conflict in some, but not in others. For example: - Strategy. This is possibly the area of greatest conflict, since to develop an effective strategy one has to know something about the clients' plans and current position. Knowing this about one client means you can potentially use that knowledge with their competitor's strategy development. You can say you are ethical until you are blue in the face, but at the end of the day the only dividing line is inside your head and it is hard to build trust based on that. If you were large enough to have a couple of strategists on your team, you could assign different ones to each project and put safeguards in place, although it is still not very reassuring to the client. - Backend software. This depends a little more on the software. Obviously if it is custom software created just for the client, and it provided a competitive edge, then there may be a conflict of interest, but there is already a pretty mature business model for this. In the case of software development, if it is custom, proprietary and exclusive, then it commands a premium price tag which makes up for the lack of business from competitors. If you retain the right to resell it, then they get a huge price break and there is no grounds for conflict of interest charges at all. - Design. There is some strategy in this, but once a creative brief exists, a good designer will put the same effort and creativity into every design, and the designer does not necessarily have to know any sensitive information to arrive at this. - Coding HTML. No business information needed, hence no conflict. - Coding content. Unless some of the content is meant to be password protected and for customers or staff-eyes only, there is no conflict here either. If you are a sole operator, and you provide all these services in one person, it can be difficult to defend against charges of conflict-of-interest. The only defensive tactic I can suggest, especially if you are in a small town, is to work extremely hard to cultivate a reputation for honesty and ethical dealings. Then you can literally "stake your reputation" on it, and that will give competitive clients a measure of reassurance. Cheers Kevin Jackson Biz-Zone Internet Group Inc. http://www.biz-zone.com/ ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Sheryl Coppenger Subject: SMTP servers > Our current web hosting company does not allow us to > modify the from field. They insist that we send out all > email with a valid email address from within our domain. - Kevin Houston, LED 1892 > As anybody knows who has gone through this... the ISPs and > the hosting providers are reacting with widely varying degrees > of paranoia, anti-competitive practices and ignorance. The > technical challenges are not that great, and the service provider > who is first off the mark with this type of service could rapidly > dominate this very lucrative market. - Kevin Jackson, LED 1895 Ah, so the people who have been doing this for years are ignorant but you know better, Mr. Jackson? If you think it's so easy and so lucrative, then put yourself on the line. Go for it. Provide the service yourself, become an instant zillionaire. One only has to wonder why "the Donald" didn't think of this himself. :-) I think that before you've been in business very long you will discover that (1) spammers lie, and they often use stolen credit card info to set up accounts -- sometimes over and over again at the same service under different names (2) there is no law that says anyone has to accept your email and (3) if you give too many of the bad guys too many chances in a very short time nobody will be accepting mail from your ISP but you. PS I've been running email systems with up to 2500 or so users for 15 years and dealing with spam for about 10 years (since the Internet went public). I disagree with some of the strategies that some ISPs come up with, but I have enough experience with how hard it is to run a quality email system to respect the job. You couldn't pay me enough to try and wrangle email at an AOL, Earthlink, or other giant ISP. Sheryl Coppenger, SEAS Computing Facility Staff The George Washington University http://www.seas.gwu.edu ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Joe Halbrook Subject: SMTP servers > Our current web hosting company does not allow us to > modify the from field. They insist that we send out all > email with a valid email address from within our domain. - Kevin Houston, LED 1892 > As anybody knows who has gone through this... the ISPs and > the hosting providers are reacting with widely varying degrees > of paranoia, anti-competitive practices and ignorance. The > technical challenges are not that great, and the service provider > who is first off the mark with this type of service could rapidly > dominate this very lucrative market. - Kevin Jackson, LED 1895 Kevins, You have both highlighted the practices that make it harder and harder to distinguish legitimate vs. unwanted (spam) email and get legitimate email delivered. At the root of the problem is, of course, the SMTP protocol, which is great in promoting "openness," but fails miserably in preventing abuse. Thus, the only logical solution is to bypass the SMTP protocol altogether, without forcing legitimate email publishers to have to learn and utilize alternative publishing methodologies. I thought about this nearly two years ago, after three years of offering what I still think is the best (although not a popular) solution to the problem of unauthenticated Senders. A whitelist- based system that allows publishers to utilize attributes of email that allow them to prove authenticity, by providing reusable words or phrases in the Subject Lines of their mailings. This method can be used to auto-whitelist such Senders, so that no legitimate email is lost. However, that system still relies on the SMTP protocol to be involved in the delivery and receipt of *every* email. A better solution must exist. My next thought process led me to this: Why couldn't we use the SMTP protocol to guarantee delivery to ONE single recipient. Then, convert that single email to browser-based content that could be delivered to web browsers, using a delivery mechanism that removes the incentive for abuse. Recipients would grant permission ONCE per email publication, and the spammers could NEVER abuse that permission. I developed such a patent-pending delivery system that does just that. It allows the legitimate email publisher to seamlessly deliver email (or any browser-based content) to a freely-downloadable notification system that is used by recipients to notify them of new incoming deliveries, and provides a web-based archive of those mailings, which requires no email software, and can be viewed from any computer's browser, regardless of location (server-based). I truly think direct-to-desktop is the next generation of email communication, and I'm open to any discussion of any fallacies that can be observed. "Where there's a will, there's a way." Joe Halbrook Permission Technologies http://www.ez-feeds.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Michael Hardy Subject: Firefox > I'd like to put out an open call for practical feedback about > the Firefox browser... What are the real and practical > advantages of Firefox, besides just sticking it to Gates > & Co.? What are the disadvantages.? - Dirk Johnson, LED 1894 All, Different browsers have advantages and disadvantages. I personally do not have the time, nor the volition to go around correcting everyone's "errors in judgement" by choosing to code only for IE. So if I really want to visit a site that has not coded properly to adapt to the browser's quirks, I simply use a different browser. They each will vye for being your "browser of choice" but even this annoyance can be dealt with by responding to the prompt with "stop asking me" or whatever jargon their dialog box uses. The browser is a bit like a library card. Do you want a library card to "East Podunk" only, or do you want to use the most universallly accepted and coded for tool available? When you dig in deep enough to the reasons why developers choose one language over another, or in this case why web surfers choose one browser over another, it can be very subjective. So why not just look at them as tools for your tool belt with different capabilities? Firefox has an excellent interface for managing bookmarks, and IE's is very cumbersome, to say the least. Firefox makes for a really lousy browser on sites that require the use of ActiveX controls and if you are using Windows XP with SP2, the firewall prompts you before allowing these controls to run (and has a nice pop-up blocker too). Do you really want to wear a tool belt that only holds one tool? That's your choice, but it's sort of like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Mike Hardy codealchemist, yahoo.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Derek Andrews Subject: Firefox I can't make a rational comparison with IE since I seldom use IE, having been scared away by all the security problems. The features I like most are the tabbed browsing and the mouse gestures extension. You will find all the current extensions at https://update.mozilla.org/extensions/ New extensions are tested before being added to the site, but I have no idea how thorough this is. Here is what they say about extensions: ------------------------ "Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to Firefox. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature. They allow the browser to be customized to fit the personal needs of each user if they need addtional features, while keeping Firefox small to download." ------------------------ The extensions I have installed currently are: *Mouse Gestures: has more gestures than I will ever be able to learn, but some of my favourites are Back, Open link in new tab and Close tab. *Popup ALT Attribute, shows the ALT tag when you point at a graphic. *Copy Plain Text, adds this function to the right click menu. There are others I want to try out such as Html Validator which adds HTML validation to the View Page Source of the browser. The validation is done by Tidy from W3c. The standard 'find on page' feature opens a toolbar which includes a Highlight button which highlights all occurences on the page, and stays enabled as you navigate to other pages. If you want anything smarter than this, I am sure there is a forum somewhere to make suggestions for new extensions. I can't help but think you will have more luck making suggestions to the Mozilla community than the Gates Corporation:) Derek Andrews, woodturner http://www.seafoamwoodturning.com Wedding Favors ~ Artisan Crafted Gifts ~ One-of-a-Kind Woodturning ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. 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