| LED Digest 1936: The Death of Email Publishing |
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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 This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it http://www.led-digest.com ............................................... February 23, 2005 Issue #1936 ............................................... .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== Site Building Software ==-- ~ Lew Wurdeman "...are there other products that would fit [our client's] their needs?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Curing Spam ==-- ~ Phil Tanny "Or we could stop publishing in email." ~ Adam Bostock "Existing email technology...is weak in terms of authenticating the sender's identity." --== RSS Feeds ==-- ~ Kathryn Martyn "I've so peppered this post with 'bad' words, it may just filter itself out..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== MSN Search ==-- ~ Dan Thies ~ Michael Martinez ======== NEW ===================================== From: Lew Wurdeman Subject: Web Site Building Software I have a client that wants to set up a service whereby people can come to their service, buy a domain name, and purchase a website template they can populate their new site with. The bought a product from Interspire called Sitebuilder but are having problems with it and wondered if there are other products that would fit their needs? Thanks! Lew Wurdeman ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Phil Tanny Subject: Curing spam We've just completed a decade of vigorous anti-spam activism. Billions of dollars and hours have been invested in this fight by some of the brightest minds and biggest wallets on the planet, and these great efforts have been supported by legislators and a public united in outrage. What did we get for all our trouble? Record levels of spam. 80% of all Net email traffic is now spam according to the New York Times. We can keep on going with more outraged debate and endless tit for tat tech and legal fixes, placing our faith in the idea that doing the same thing over and over will someday somehow lead to different results. Or we could stop publishing in email. If legitimate publishers stop publishing in bulk email spam will still exist, but it would now be contained within a clearly defined "trash channel". Legitimate publishers would all be found in the RSS channel. Nice and tidy, and easy for our audience to understand. The branding association between the nasty illegal scams our readers regularly get via bulk email and our legitimate business publications will be broken. And we will no longer find it necessary to publicly speculate on how many of our readers are idiots. Secure and forward looking email publishers will see the opportunity for leadership, make the decisive move out of bulk email, and use their RSS only publications to show the way forward to a happier era. The phase when publishing an emailed newsletter was cutting edge cool is now coming to a close. Those of us who are still publishing in the bulk email channel are, through no fault of our own, prolonging our industry's association with spam and thus damaging our legitimate publishing peers. None of this is fair of course. But on the other hand, RSS does offer a real possibility of finally breaking the connection between legitimate publishers and spammers and that's an opportunity for liberation we can all celebrate together. We've been fighting this war on a battlefield where the spammer has all the advantages. That's why a relative handful of lame bozos continue to beat a large community of smart and energized Netizens. Let's move the struggle to a battlefield where the reader has all the control, and thus the legitimate value oriented publisher has the advantage. Haven't we suffered long enough? Phil Tanny http://links-for-you.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Adam Bostock Subject: Curing spam John Smart has hit one of the nails on the head. Existing email technology, as used by most people, is weak in terms of authenticating the sender's identity. However, the good news is that there is an existing option that allows authentication of the sender's identity. It has been around for many years, yet strangely it has not become main stream for email use. The technology is digital certificates. You purchase a unique digital certificate which represents your identity, or that of your business. By making a simple modification to mail servers it would be possible for recipients to automatically reject all email that has not been digitally signed, except for email addresses the recipient has authorised (e.g. those in your address book). This means a spammer must make contact using their digital certificate. Having received their first "offer" you would then have the option to reject further emails from that identity, by telling your mail server to automatically reject them at your postbox. Of course, no system is perfect but it would drastically cut down on the amount of spam. For the same spammer to contact you again they would need a different identity. Therefore, the integrity of this solution relies on robust identity checks (e.g. a validated bank account). The other big plus is that we get rid of this stupid sledgehamer to crack a nut approach, where all users on a shared IP address are currently penalised for the activities of one alleged "rogue". The authentication of the sender is key to the reduction of spam. By the way, digital certificates also allow secure communications (proof a message has not been tampered with, and encryption). Regards Adam Bostock, Innovation Consultant Acro Logic - Innovation and Bright Ideas www.acrologic.co.uk ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Kathryn Martyn Subject: RSS I originally asked for info on "turning a web page into a feed," and Dan replied, "It's not exactly that you turn a web page into a feed... I know of the software such as Movable Type, etc. I use Blogger.com for my blogs as I mentioned including The Slimming Pool http://slimming.onemorebite.com I was curious about an example in the start of this thread, where someone referred to his site, and had an RSS feed of that home page. I agree that RSS feeds are probably going to eclipse e-mail via regular channels, at least for the delivery of newsletters and the like. My subject matter being weight loss you can imagine how difficult it is to get past filters. When someone specifically requests a newsletter yet it is not delivered, many times with a nasty message being sent to the sender (me), well I find it a sorry state of affairs. Most people don't realize the info they've requested is being refused so they have no way to whitelist or otherwise attempt to receive it, and I'd expect in most cases a simple whitelist isn't even possible. Most of the major filters don't allow users to make that decision. Educational sites for example won't even allow me to send a message privately. I expect they simply reject my domain name, yet, that's frankly absurd. I offer a way for children of this country to get off the obesity track, yet I can't let educators know. Ridiculous state of affairs indeed. Heaven help legitimate mortgage brokers, vacation professionals, insurance brokers, etc. trying to make a living. I've so peppered this post with "bad" words, it may just filter itself out of quite a few inboxes itself. LOL Kathryn Martyn, M.NLP Ending Emotional Eating, One Bite at a Time http://www.onemorebite-weightloss.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Dan Thies Subject: MSN > Can anyone tell me how does the new MSN search works. - Baruch Avraham, LED 1935 Baruch, You should be able to improve your rankings across the board with a little bit of redesign. Your current site doesn't make much use of the structural elements of HTML, such as headings (h1, h2, h3...). Your title tags are also pretty long on some pages, and you aren't using any text links within your site to support your keyword strategy. Dan Thies SEO Research Labs http://www.seoresearchlabs.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: MSN So far the general consensus seems to be that MSN depends more on traditional or unadjusted link popularity than Yahoo! (using Inktomi's technology) or Google. Despite the fact that MSN is doing daily crawls and updates, freshness of content doesn't seem to have as much importance to them as other factors. Age of the site and size seem to matter more than in other search engines. However, MSN is tweaking the service. For example, the RSS spam trick many people have advocated, where you add "&format=rss" to the end of the generated URL for any search and then submit that to MSN, no longer works. They have removed linefeeds from the output and RSS/XML parsers cannot extract the content. It would probably benefit most people to wait a few more months before worrying too much about MSN. If they cannot improve the quality of their search results, I doubt users will stay with the service. Michael Martinez, Author Understanding Middle-earth, Parma Endorion, and Visualizing Middle-earth http://www.michael-martinez.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Never break your putter and your driver in the same round or you're dead." - Tommy Bolt |
