The River

Apologies for the outage (if anyone even noticed but me). Not sure if I’m actually up yet. Here’s what my hosting provider says:

Unfortunately there has been a fire within a router which connects the DNS servers to the outside world and has caused disruption to the — Web Hosting service. Please note that we are working on this situation but due to melted cabling it is taking us some time to fix this problem. We anticipate that your site will be online within a few hours. Please bear with us.

Oh, well.

Following AOL/Advertising.com, we’ve got e-mail action and agency combinations. Interesting times (and I don’t mean that in the Chinese curse sort of way).

• Return Path buys NetCreations
  
• Agency.com Gobbles Up Exile On Seventh
  
• aQuantive picks up SBI.Razorfish
  

P.S. The dearth of recent posts is partly due to the blistering pace of news and partly due to activities surrounding my pending relocation to the Bay Area (and my husband’s recent move over there). Busy, busy, busy. But in a good way!

The folks working on the SPF e-mail sender authentication scheme (anti-spoofing/spamming technology) have started a store on CafePress to raise money for implementation.

The dog t-shirt is the best.

Gary has a nice post about a subject that’s been interesting me as of late: Web services and its marketing applications. The impetus? eBay just followed Amazon’s lead by offering more Web services applications for its affiliates.

I wrote about this a while back for ClickZ and am keeping something of an eye on it. Fascinating stuff, though very much in the realm of the techie right now.

Big story of the day: America Online to Acquire Advertising.com in $435M Deal.

A quickie: My (non-techie) husband has taken to calling regular postal junk mail “spam.” Works for me.

Now that Google’s giving away more and more Gmail accounts — current users’ accounts were recently topped up with six more invitations each — everyone’s offering to invite friends, acquaintances, etc. One kind soul offered accounts on an e-mail list I participate in. Others use their blogs to practice their benevolence. An alliance has even sprung up to give away Gmail accounts to our troops.

I’ve had a Gmail account (or two) for quite some time, but I have to admit I haven’t been making such offers. The reason? Gmail has a lot of problems/drawbacks.

Some examples:

• Can’t change your address/Use existing addresses. On my Yahoo! Mail (granted, I pay $19.99/year for it), I can use any address I own. I can receive at those addresses (through forwarding) and mail from them. There’s no need to be tethered to any Yahoo! branding, as there is with Gmail.
  
• No POP access. It’s been said before many times. You can’t retrieve your Gmail for reading elsewhere. (Though I have seen talk of an app. that’s said to address this.)
  
• No disposable addresses. My Yahoo! account lets me create any number of disposable e-mail addresses to give out when the occasion calls for it.
  
• Lack of attention to spam. Gmail’s spam filter — when I was using it regularly a while back — seemed to let through quite a bit more than my other filters. Also, (and I watch these things), I don’t see anyone from Gmail participating in any of the anti-spam disussions taking place among major e-mail providers.
  

The main problem with Gmail, though, isn’t any particular failing. It’s just the fact that it doesn’t have a unique compelling value proposition. I can get everything I need with Yahoo! for twenty bucks a year. As Matt blogged a while back: “…all these people talking about how 30mm people are going to switch over to it must be seeing something I don’t.”

P.S. All that said, if anyone still wants a Gmail account, I will part with a few. (I need to hold on to some for testing.) E-mail me at theriver (at) mcnigel.com. Just please let me know why you want one.

Nate posts about a somewhat alarming demonstration given at a recent Tacoda event for publisher clients.

The gist of the issue is this… publishers targeting on behavioral can potentially use ad serving data (including click-through data) as targeting criteria. Therefore, one could target an ad for a cellular phone company to just those users who’d clicked on another phone company’s campaign. The implications for advertisers are obvious.

As Nate puts it: …if I was an advertiser, this would scare the hell out of me. At the very least, this example should make advertisers very conscious of the language on their behavioral IOs. I could also see this type of data misuse convincing advertisers that it’s too early to jump into behavioral at all.

UPDATE: I should add that Tacoda’s Dave Morgan stepped up in the middle of the demo — clearly understanding the incendiary nature of the issue — and made clear that the company didn’t advocate the use of such data for such purposes, but was simply discussing it.

I have to admit the thought of using ad serving/clicking data in behavioral is new to me — but it’s absolutely something the industry should be thinking about seriously.

NYT has a story (free reg) about Silicon Valley’s recovery. As I’m headed that way and expect to be spending some time in SV, I’m especially interested in getting the pulse of what’s going on.

Telling quote: “Silicon Valley is no longer at death’s door,” said Mike Moeller, director of corporate communications at Hewlett-Packard. “People are no longer in shock. But is Silicon Valley back? That’s like saying a patient who was in diabetic coma for several years is healthy again because he can lift his head and open his eyes.”

T-Mobile has introduced “My Album” and “My Journal” features, basically to encourage photoblogging and online photo albums for multimedia phones. Pretty fascinating stuff. Tried to post photos to a Blogger blog by sending a multimedia message to the e-mail posting address, but it didn’t work. And, yes, this means I’ve worked out some of the e-mailing features on my new phone, although I’m still not satisfied at how it all works. Still quite kludgy, but we’re getting there.