Authenticating Email

Bob PageLeave a comment

I’m at the point where a quick scan of my spam folder tells me if I want to read anything in it. I may even go days at a time without reading anything, and then just dump the whole folder. I’ve had a few false positives — email that wasn’t spam, but looked it for some reason.

Spam will always be with us, and we’ll always be looking for ways to limit it – and legitimate direct marketing efforts will be looking for ways for their messages to get through. One method gaining popularity is the authentication of email — making sure the From: line is not faked. This doesn’t reduce spam per se but allows recipients to be sure that the sender is really the sender. Since many spammers fake their sending addresses, authentication could cut down on this kind of spam. It would also be another factor in the spam filtering wars.

I see that the the Direct Marketing Association recently announced that they are co-underwriting the upcoming Email Authentication Summit. Yahoo! is also a co-underwriter. Nice to see the DMA involved, and hopefully that will send a signal to all direct marketers that they should learn more about email authentication.

Authenticating Email

Recipe for Web Site Governance

Bob PageLeave a comment

Great advice from David Schatsky on governing your web site . This passage struck me:

Some guidelines are about navigation, some are about product information, some are about promotions. Each of those are different competencies. Delegate responsibility for each of those areas to different folks.

Why not also look at specific metrics for each? Designers think in these terms, web developers think in these terms .. shouldn’t our web analytics think in these terms too?

Recipe for Web Site Governance

Feedburner’s Total Stats Pro

Bob PageLeave a comment

If you have a blog, you may already know about FeedBurner, a “feed enhancement service.” I don’t serve my feeds from FeedBurner, but lots of people do.

They’ve always provided some free statistics, and recently enhanced the free stats with ad summary performance and circulation trend charting. But they now have a premium service called Total Stats Pro that adds referrer reporting, detailed item and ad stats, including who’s syndicating your feed. Pricing is pretty cheap.

Feedburner’s Total Stats Pro

Subscribe or Purchase? Why Decide?

Bob PageLeave a comment

This could be the thing that gets people over the hump of subscribing to music.

For a long time I thought it was silly to be “renting” music — if you like a song and want to hear it for years, it would be cheaper to buy it, rather than renting it every month. Kinda like how phones used to be before you could legally own a phone . (OK I’m dating myself.)

But this new service could change that. First, for just listening to stuff, why not subscribe? At $5/mo (for a year) it’s cheaper than XM or Sirius, and you can take it with you. If you really like a song, you can buy it for $0.79.

All in all it looks like a killer offering. Except I won’t be using it, even though Y! employees get a break on the price. You see, it doesn’t work with my Mac or iPod.

Subscribe or Purchase? Why Decide?

Click Me

Bob PageLeave a comment

Jeremy wonders how much anchor text matters, and opines that a company named “Click Here” would never make it to the first page of the search results.

So true. Or is it? Another common word used as anchor text is “download”:

While download.com appears at the top (which I suppose you’d want), this query may also be an indicator for the most popular downloads on the net.

Perhaps contextual or clustered search would help with these kinds of “signal vs. noise” problems.

Speaking of noise, I’ve often said that if I wanted to disappear from search results, all I’d have to do is change my first name to “Web” …

(yes, it’s Friday!)

Click Me

Consistency

Bob PageLeave a comment

OK, nothing to do with analytics or Yahoo. I was reading news feeds today and came across a press release where a PR person announced he has started a blog, “to Share Insight and Observations on Society, Politics and Business” (his caps).

I dunno, maybe it’s the coffee, but I think this is funny. Who else would issue a press release when they start a blog? I guess when you’re a promoter, that’s what you do. I hope he doesn’t issue a press release every time he posts a new blog entry, or gets a Flickr account.

Consistency