The River

Anne Mitchell says it well and it bears repeating. SPF is not about stopping spam. It’s about making sure the purported sender domain (be it citibank.com or bank-usa.com) of an e-mail really is the sender.

SPF (and Sender ID) are, of course, considered first steps toward stopping spam. Once you know who really sent a message, you can determine whether that domain is a known spam or known ham sender. Spam gets blocked; ham doesn’t.

Anne is totally right to scream about misconceptions about SPF. After all, I’d hate for e-mail authentication to be branded a “failure” for failing to do what it was never designed or expected to do in the first place.

“Citizen journalist”/blogger Steve Rubel is at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital moblogging the scene as reporters wait to hear the latest about President Clinton’s emergency quadruple bypass surgery. It’s funny for me — who has dealt with Steve in his capacity as a PR guy — to see him flip sides and embrace the journalist role. Heck, he was even interviewed by Entertainment Tonight!

Steve says:

If you’ve never seen the media assemble for a major news event, it’s fascinating. There are people all over the sidewalks all waiting for the hospital PR people to make a statement. They were supposed to do so at 1:30 p.m. Eastern, but it’s now 2:20 nad there’s no word yet when they might.

As for me… I’ll be signing off soon for the Labor Day weekend. I’m wishing the former President well, and hoping all of you have a lovely, relaxing few days off.

Rushkoff writes about the PS 122 blog panel discussion last night — specifically about his perception that there seemed to be forces at work against even considering the idea of an ad-free blogosphere’s value.

Honestly, this is one reason I love Rushkoff. I write about ads and marketing all day long and I carry Google AdSense ads on my blog (which have earned me approx. $1 $1.50 for anyone who cares). But, folks, there are things more important than money. Why give up on the idea of using this incredible technology to really make a difference in people’s lives? Why squelch that idea when it arises?

Rushkoff came and talked to our graduate journalism school class at Columbia, and he really knocked people’s socks off. Why? He challenged their assumptions and got them thinking in whole new ways. Why not let yourself at least consider a different way of thinking?

UPDATE:
This debate has sparked a lot of discussion here and there:

Jeff Jarvis (the moderator)

Fred Wilson

Ken Layne

Dave Winer

Ed Cone

UPDATE2: Rushkoff’s follow up

I put Google AdSense ads on an experimental (for my eyes only) blog as an experiment — what kind of ads would be served, I wondered. At first, I got public service ads, and then, only hours later, the ads started to be relevant. Between the first PSAs and the eventual ads, I input the URL (created only a couple of days ago) to Google’s Web search submission form. Was it the URL input and a (very fast) Web crawl that made the difference? Or were the ads acting as a homing beacon telling Google to crawl this page, pronto? Either way, I’m impressed.

UPDATE: it looks like the “homing beacon” idea was the proper one. I found “Mediapartners-Google/2.1” on my server log today.

I had a lot of fun this week reporting a story about PremierGuide’s new functionality. Though the new features were interesting, what was much more fascinating to me was the trend toward integrating social networks and local search platforms.

I spent a lot of time talking about this with PremierGuide President and CEO Malcolm Lewis and the Kelsey Group’s Greg Sterling. Lewis talked about his wife’s interest — when making purchasing decisions — in obtaining the opinions of her Palo Alto/Menlo Park Mother’s Group. (Why am I completely unsurprised this group has a Web presence?) He outlined a scenario in which his wife could filter local search results based upon the recommendations of other mothers in the group. This idea makes complete sense and absolutely serves an important consumer need. (Note: the PremierGuide demo site is at loqal.com)

Sterling pointed out other sort of under-the-radar companies based upon this concept, like Judy’s Book (which he said was founded by the same person who started Abuzz, which was later sold to the NY Times) and InsiderPages.com, an idealab company. There’s also local-i, which we wrote about in ClickZ News a while back. (Former Jupiter Research analyst Matthew Berk is involved in this one. Thanks, Niki, for the tip.)

Needless to say, achieving a critical mass of regular users and reviewers is critical to the value proposition. Yahoo! is working on this. Note today’s blog entry about Yahoo! Local, which exhorts users to submit reviews:

We think merchant and user communities can be very helpful in providing fresh, accurate content.

To that point, a way to help build out the content on Yahoo! Local, is to submit a review of your own, like my eloquent write-up on Sal?s Pizzeria in Mamaroneck NY.

Not only have we gotten a ton of restaurant reviews ? people are submitting reviews on just about anyplace or anyone. I?ve seen reviews for dentists, auto repair shops, even the local dry cleaner. We?ve received thousands of reviews already, and in general, they?ve been very informative.

Yahoo! obviously has a good chance — because of its sheer volume of traffic — of getting these user reviews rolling along. Super local players, like local newspapers or yellow pages players (PremierGuide’s target audience) have a good chance here, too, as users are accustomed to going there for information about local merchants. Craigslist, needless to say, has a very loyal audience and a lot of user trust. How will this all play out? Don’t know… just watching and waiting and continuing the conversation.

Funny take on Gizmodo about the NYTimes Circuits story on the iPod’s shuffle feature (like no other electronic gadget ever had “shuffle” before… duh). The (whacked-out) premise of the article (free reg. required) is that people’s iPods, when on shuffle, betray their “preferences” for certain types of music. One interviewee notes that his iPod “drifts” toward a tune by a certain American Idol.

“It really likes Ruben Studdard,” the winner of “American Idol’s” second season, Mr. Angus said. This, despite the fact that he only has one song of Mr. Studdard’s – the soulful ballad “Sorry 2004” – stored on his 20-gigabyte player. “There’s nothing worse than when you are having an intense workout and Ruben comes on,” he said, “but it seems to always happen to me.”

Here I was thinking these problems were solved by those fancy-schmancy iPod features called “playlists.” I guess I’m not really “listening” to my iPod’s secret inner desires.

UPDATE: Ok, to be fair to NYT, I should add (now that I’ve actually read page 2) that the author mentions playlists in the piece, but says most people interviewed for the story had never heard of them. The story also mentions the fact that it’s algorithms that mimic “randomness.”

Gary sends an e-mail on the algorithm favoritism issue:

You know, I had a multi-disc player that also had a tape deck. You could load in 6 CDs, put in an audio tape, hit shuffle and record and it would create a random mix tape. I used to notice that all my tapes would seem to favor one CD more than any other.

I always thought this had to do with the fact that computers can’t really pick random numbers. Although its a function of every computer language, the mechanics are really to take some known number…like seconds since 1936, or number of mouse-clicks in the last 72 hours…and put that into some complicated algorithm to generate a new number. So, if the algorithm wasn’t that great, you would always get ‘random’ numbers that were pretty similar. I figured that the guys who did the programming for the stereo didn’t put a lot of work in. I wonder if that’s the story with the iPod?