Shelly Palmer missed the point in his Spin today. Forget for a second what tiered pricing would mean for access speed and think of what happens when telcos decide the Internet looks more profitable as a series of walled gardens. That's when we're truly screwed. Just read Doc's piece. What he says.
We just had another ad sales rep call to tell us that an ad package we had planned to recommend to a client was no longer on the table due to competitive issues. This happened to us with another client last year. The publisher in question had decided to take down our ads after the contract was signed and the ads had been running for three weeks.
It never bothers me when potential partners decline to pitch a piece of business. It bothers me when they claim they can pitch it, put inventory in front of us and then later pull out.
In today's case, we had asked the vendor THREE TIMES to confirm they could run our client's advertising. We asked them three times because we knew they had a service that was directly competitive to that of our client. Three times we asked and three times they insisted they could run the advertising. As our recommendation is going out the door, they call to pull out.
So, yeah...When we ask "Are you sure?" we're not asking just to hear ourselves talk.
Only an evil genius can make it possible for a sitting president to get up in front of the American people, admit he took the nation to war under false pretenses and insist that we were on the right track all along. If Bush gets away with this, he will have pulled the biggest bait and switch in history. So who is the evil genius behind the curtain?
Just got an e-mail full of "Holiday Shopping Deals from ShopLocal" from the Chicago Tribune. Whenever I register for newspaper sites, I always make sure to uncheck the boxes for e-mail communication, so that I don't get "offers" like this. But many times, I still do. And when I get something from what I consider to be a reputable publisher, I always unsubscribe.
Not so with the Chicago Tribune mailing. When I click the "unsubscribe" link in their e-mail, I'm told I have to log in with a password I didn't know I had in order to change my preferences and get off their list. Conveniently, the site pretends that the e-mail address it sent the spam to doesn't exist in its system, so I have to figure out what my user name and password are in order to opt out.
The Chicago Tribune should know that we have ways of fighting this kind of spamming behavior. The first way is through posting to my blog. The second way is by labeling their communication as Spam, so that everyone else who uses Cloudmark will have it labeled as Spam, too.
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