Today, it is sunny and glorious here. Nary a cloud in the sky. It’s been nice pretty much all week and I’ve been revelling in the light. I got to wear my new sunglasses yesterday when I went into town for a lunch meeting. In fact, I was so inspired by the Vitamin D intensity that I turned the car heater up high and opened the sunroof. It was good.
In more nerdy news, we updated our Logical Expressions site (http://www.logicalexpressions.com) to include "feeds" from all our other sites. It’s pretty cool. We also added a page on the Computor Companion site (http://www.computorcompanion.com) that lets people include the CC-Tips feed on their own sites (you might have noticed the little ad above). If you have questions on how it works, feel free to ask!
After my tirade on spam a few weeks ago, it seems like spam has been making the news in a big way. An article from Reuters this morning said, "Internet users received an average of 571 pieces of unsolicited commercial e-mail in 2001, a number expected to rise to nearly 1,500 by 2006, according to Jupiter Media Metrix." Another article I read said, that some people get 1,500 pieces of spam yearly. Clearly, being popular online is becoming less and less fun.
But what’s been bothering me lately is what spam is doing to business communication. You often read statistics about how spam costs money because it wastes people’s time. That’s a given. But a more insidious question is: Has spam made business communication via e-mail completely impossible?
A few months ago, I talked to someone who said that he gets 200 e-mail messages a week and 95% of them are spam. So, every few days, he just deletes *everything* unread. I was sort of appalled, but I’m wondering if his case is really that unusual. For example, I’ve I sent inquiries asking about ad rates lately to a couple of publishers. Basically I’m asking how I can GIVE their business MONEY. I get no reply. Complete cyber silence.
Now, I’m probably going to have to make long-distance calls to try and get the answer to my questions. Except I’ll undoubtedly get dumped into someone’s voice mail. Where I’ll leave a detailed message and carefully state my phone number twice. And get no return call.
So maybe people are just using spam as an excuse for a different problem: being completely lame.