Posts from May 2004

The Spam weblog at WeblogsInc has a piece on the negative reaction to Microsoft’s Bonded Sender program in which marketers “pay” to get through spam filters.

The gist of the negative reaction is that the program lines the pockets of Microsoft but doesn’t do anything to rid inboxes of spam that is currently getting through.

I think that reaction is a bit shortsighted. Spam filters are going to get better and better. They will continue to tighten the noose on spammers. My mail box is certainly a lot better off than it was a year ago. I am fairly certain that’s true of everyone who is using a good spam filter today.

The problem Bonded Sender is trying to solve is the false positive problem, which is growing. Read Seth Godin’s recent post on the false positive problem.

This guy from the Seattle Times says, “Maybe my idea of screening is to have a mailbox with no marketing messages at all.”

That’s not my idea of a good outcome. I get messages from ticketmaster, eBay, my bank, my phone company, and many more “marketers” that I completely and totally rely on. They are a critical part of my routine. And I am sure that I am not alone in this behavior.

So I applaud Microsoft for trying to tackle the false positive problem. Bonded Sender may not be the best solution, but its a step in the right direction.

Here is my gift to Jerry today.

Yankee RSS feeds from WCBS.

Someone needs to create a central directory of all these feeds coming online.

If you know of one, let me know.

Jerry sent me to look at the new Zogby battleground state numbers at Dailykos.

Wow!

I guess i was right when i said that Kerry wishes the election was today.

It will be interesting to see how Kerry plays as the frontrunner now.

The people who commented on my post about Charting Bush were fairly unanimous that the President’s approval rating was oversold and a “bounce” was coming. Maybe his speech tonight will do that. But the latest CBS poll shows it’s gone even lower in the past week. Kerry sure wishes that the election was being held this week.

First, i want all of you to know that i am not just talking up one of my portfolio companies here. I am genuinely intrigued by this BlogPulse service that I posted about last week.

The thing i like the best is the trend line tool.

To showcase what you can do, i decided to chart Shrek vs. Harry Potter. I threw my personal favorite Lord of the Rings in for good measure.

I was reading Rafat Ali today and his post on AOL’s MyMC cable channel got me thinking about a killer app for cable operators.

I use Music Choice on my DirecTV service all the time. I have the reciever connected directly into my multi-room audio system so I can play MusicChoice in any room that has audio. The various channels are pretty good. I personally like Channel 820 on my service which is the Progressive/Adult Alternative channel (Music Choice channel 10). I can also see song/artist/title information scroll across my TV screen which is a nice feature.

I thought I was one of the few people who actually used this service. But yesterday i was at my friends Steve and Vanessa’s apartment and they were playing Music Choice on their Time Warner digital cable service. They were listening to the Country music channel.

Then today, my wife Joanne, The Gotham Gal, told me how much she likes the Rhapsody service i installed on her computer over the weekend. She is really digging the new Morrissey disc.

So it wasn’t too surprising that it hit me reading Rafat’s post. The killer app for cable operators is a Rhapsody like service delivered over cable like Music Choice is. Why doesn’t that exist?

For those of you who were reading my blog last fall, you know that I am a big fan of General Wes Clark. He was my favorite of the Democrat presidential candidates. I am fine with the choice of John Kerry, but I thought then and still think that Wes Clark’s strong views on how we need to fight the war on terrorism are right on the money.

So with that, I send you to Wes’ most recent piece on this subject which was printed in the Washington Monthly this month. He makes the case that the war on terror and the related desire to bring freedom and democracy to the middle east is not something we can do with guns and bullets. He argues for a strategy like the one we used to fight Communism.

My first thought was of the brilliant Peter Sellers movie when I read this Michael Moore quote about scenes in Fahrenheit 9/11 right before Bush declared war – “In your wildest dreams you couldn’t have imagined Franklin Roosevelt behaving this way 30 second before declaring war, with grave decisions and consequences at stake. But that may be giving him credit for thinking that the decisions were grave.”

I just read this review of the first concert of the Wilco tour. I’ve got to scrounge up some tickets to the June 8th show.