David Strom reports that an increasing percentage of email is being filtered—often without the recipient’s knowledge. More and more frequently, harmless email is being branded as spam due to the inclusion of words that the filters brand as inappropriate. Quoted in the article: “In short, we’re starting to see signs that email, often hailed as the Internet’s ‘killer app,’ is in danger of becoming an unreliable, arbitrarily censored medium – and there’s very little we can do about it.”
Month: July 2002 (Page 2 of 3)
OJR: News Sites Hustle for Profitability. “Most news sites are going with the conventional wisdom: Users won’t pay to see your site; you have to find other ways to make money.”
I’ve had a hunch for a while now that stock prices had been twice or three times as expensive as they should be, even after the dotcom bubble. Unfortunately, the markets are now agreeing with me, and stocks are declining like Michael Jackson’s album sales. I now call the big index the Dow(n) Jones, and I’m just holding out hope we don’t end up in a decade without growth.
Good thread at Sportsfilter dealing with major league baseball’s contention that some teams won’t be able to make payroll this summer. In it I analyze how new revenue-friendly ballparks do not correlate with the team’s success or recurrent fan interest.
Meanwhile, baseball executives are busy telling lies to the media that their own statistics refute. Then they wonder why people don’t believe the spin.
Earth to Selig and Fehr: Unless you start paying attention, you won’t have any payroll to worry about, once the strike/lockout kicks in and the fans lose interest.
Major League Baseball voluntarily ended a game in a tie last night.
That maneuver is such an amazingly appropriate symbol of everything wrong with baseball that it’s hard to fathom how it came off so smoothly.
I’m going to compile a list here of the best editorial screeds telling baseball what the players and owners need, but refuse, to hear about the state of its sport:
~ Feeling cheated? Get used to it, Jim Caple, ESPN.com
~ Baseball’s All-Stall Break (mentioned here yesterday), Dave Anderson, The New York Times
~ The Strike That Will Kill Baseball, Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post
Know another one? Send it along.
“Baseball has succeeded in doing what no sport should ever do: taking the fun out of it.” Dave Anderson nails baseball with his sadly accurate column in today’s Times.
Labels to Net radio: die now. Because the truth is that the music industry makes more money off the generic fan than the aficionado.
Wise small- and mid-size labels should independently eschew the new fees, returning them to broadcasters and encouraging their music is played online. One can only hope.
Nice review of the book spotted today. “Reading each chapter,” writes the reviewer, “I felt like a co-worker looking over the shoulder of designers wrestling with classic web interface questions.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: My mother makes the hands-down flat-out no-question best chocolate chip cookies the world has ever known.
I’d offer samples to everyone but I eat them too fast. Trust me on this, though.
I know her secret, too, and I’m not telling.
The Economist writes about weblogs this week. Alas, no mention of their weblogging design director. *clearing throat*