The River

I’m at our Jupiter/ClickZ AdForum today and tomorrow in New York. So far, it’s been great to see old industry friends and met some news ones. I’ve had some really thoughtful discussions with attendees — always a mark of an event that will fuel future ideas.

My colleague Nate Elliott has entries on:

Bambi Francisco at Marketwatch says (among other things):

Yahoo has both search and branded advertising. What will it cost Google to maintain its attractiveness to consumers and investors? It’s already taking the steps to emulate Yahoo by offering Gmail.

But does it know the media business like Yahoo does?

Aargh. My first RSS (via e-mail) spam. How very unpleasant.

Sad how the e-mail channel is so corrupted that it seeps over into other platforms.

An excerpt:

WINNING NOTIFICATION!! eqh
By THE LOTTERY CO-ORDINATOR <heuegolilotterynotification2004@702mail.co.za>To pamela.343439@bloglines.com
FROM: THE LOTTERY COORDINATOR,INTERNATIONAL PROMOTIONS/PRIZE AWARD DEPARTMENT

DEAR SIR/MADAM

UPDATE: More clarification is probably needed on this post. Bloglines has a feature where you can generate e-mail addresses, and then use them to receive your e-mail subscriptions in your RSS reader. Makes it easier to unsubscribe, theoretically, from e-mail newsletters. You’d think it would boost subscriptions, too, if it were that easy (and guaranteed) to unsubscribe. Anyway, I set up an address to test this delivery method, and am already getting spam. It’s been a few months, but I guess it’s been discovered.

As I started to look into it further, it turns out this e-mail address shows up on my public Bloglines profile and on my auto-generated blogroll on The River, so it’s no wonder it’s been harvested. Thankfully, I can easily unsubscribe from any e-mail address/RSS feed that’s been polluted like this, and I can also select settings to keep these e-mail addresses private.

Well, a lot of people think the Democratic National Convention’s pro-blogging policies are a sign of the format’s maturation. A couple of interesting pieces on the phenomenon today:

Microsoft is now offering a free download of Lookout, the Outlook-compatible search tool it acquired last week.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

This is fantastic: “A total of 20 mature students at Strathclyde University’s Senior Studies Institute took part in a tutorial on the various uses of a mobile phone.”

Nice defense of e-mail by Matt Blumberg of Return Path. I agree. There are definitely flaws in the medium, but efforts are underway (spam filtering, e-mail authentication, reputation services) that I think will make a big and positive impact. For person-to-person communications online, what else is there? There are instant messaging apps, for sure, and some suggest they will take on e-mail traffic. That’s a possibility, I suppose, but I think e-mail in its current incarnation (as seen from the end-user perspective) has become too important to abandon. Those who think it’s on its way out probably take it for granted to the extent that they don’t realize what life would be like without it.

*sniff* Anil Dash gives me a preview of what it feels like to leave New York City for San Francisco. I can already feel myself disengaging from this place in some ways. Yet, there are other parts of my life here I want to grasp onto more tightly than ever.

Lunch at the Pike Place Market. A simple fresh delicious halibut sandwich. Amazing. More pictures to come if I can figure out how to work this thing.