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would you give money to these people?
Jul. 16th, 2004 11:07 amI picked up a flyer in a local convenience store for a new DVD Rental company. Check out their stunning website. Of particular interest is the general "designed by 15-year-old kid" look and feel, the out-of-focus scanned images, and the huge list of locations.
from the front lines
Jun. 25th, 2004 12:58 pm
(Photograph: Kieran Clancy/PicSure)That's on the road to Shannon as opposed to, say, Mosul.
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several years too late
Mar. 31st, 2004 11:12 amThis is the sort of thing we should have been doing at Jobfinder/Stepstone - RSS feeds for jobs. Never mind the fact that the only RSS reader at the time of note was probably My Netscape; it would have made our cross-branding stuff SO much easier to manage. Of course, I suggested this in a talk on RSS I gave last year.
that'll be thirty cents, please
Feb. 6th, 2004 01:57 pmHmm, maybe I need to give up reading c|net again: Is charging for email such a bad idea?. Well, yes, it is here, because you're not offering a solution to the biggest problem with the idea, which is "How Do You Charge For Email?" It's all well and good to tell me that if a spammer is charged 25¢ per email his business model goes out the window, but how does the spammer pay that money? With a stolen credit card? By hijacking, as is increasingly frequent, someone else's connection, so that the hijackee pays instead? How does this solve spam any better than faulty laws?
How about going after the money? Prosecute companies who knowingly use spammers to advertise, lower merchant credit limits on companies caught advertising with spam, cancel credit-card payments to spammers - I know AmEx can take up to three months to settle with the merchant, which is plenty time to investigate spam complaints. It's not that hard; sure, the spammer's hidden away in a cave in Florida, but the company name is right there on the spam. The charge usually levelled at this tactic is that, well, my competitor sends spam with my name on it, and I take the rap; I can't see how this stands up to even basic scrutiny, since if I've paid for a spamming run, there will be a paper trail pointing at me. If I haven't, sure, the competitor and the spammer both get away with it, but hey. It's at least worth a try.
How about going after the money? Prosecute companies who knowingly use spammers to advertise, lower merchant credit limits on companies caught advertising with spam, cancel credit-card payments to spammers - I know AmEx can take up to three months to settle with the merchant, which is plenty time to investigate spam complaints. It's not that hard; sure, the spammer's hidden away in a cave in Florida, but the company name is right there on the spam. The charge usually levelled at this tactic is that, well, my competitor sends spam with my name on it, and I take the rap; I can't see how this stands up to even basic scrutiny, since if I've paid for a spamming run, there will be a paper trail pointing at me. If I haven't, sure, the competitor and the spammer both get away with it, but hey. It's at least worth a try.
