Stop Direct Mail!

Image via WikipediaAnnoying. Wasteful. Downright useless.

What am I talking about? Direct mail.

Notice how that pile of paper you bring in from the mailbox (street-side, just-inside-front-door, wherever it is) is mostly stuff you bring in one door and out the other? Literally or figuratively, most of that mail ends up going right through the house and into the recycling (though sadly, some people – my dad included – just throw it away).

If one were to examine that bulk of mail, one might find that virtually every last piece is trying to sell something. From yard services to home-improvement solutions, dinner discounts to electronics, marketers just keep shoveling colorful, glossy paper into our houses, hoping that their message will be the one to catch your eye and result in a sale. Just think how much paper, ink, and energy that takes.

The practice is perfectly legal, of course. More legal even than telemarketing, since there's no Do Not Mail List (so far as I know) to worry about. At the very least, any residential address is fair game. Spam is illegal, and all it does is waste time; but why is this resource-squandering activity still allowed?

I would guess that when it comes to direct mailers, the United States Post Office is perfectly content to live and let live. Excuse me for being cynical, but just think of all the postage marketers pay the USPS to deliver their paper-wasting missives! It also guarantees jobs for postal carriers (can't say "mailmen" these days; it's not politically correct) because the sheer volume of paper being sent to homes across the nation virtually ensures that every house on every carrier's route will have mail every day.

So much for the government supporting "green" practices. What would be truly environmentally friendly, I think, is if the government changed the spam laws to allow electronic versions of direct mail, and outlawed the paper variety. Ah, but then people would complain that the government changed its mind and began condoning spam. There would be a difference, though: if paper direct mail is not paper spam, then electronic direct mail is not electronic spam. Logical? Of course. Acceptable to the public? I doubt it.

But I can provide further reasoning in favor of transitioning the massive direct mail industry to the electronic front. Consider: Every piece of paper mail that comes in must be sorted and processed by a person, generally a homeowner whose time would be better spent doing other tasks like taking care of the house or unwinding after a day at the office. When an email is received, the computer (in my case, a Gmail server farm somewhere) is already running many, many checks on the message to validate its origin, confirm that it isn't spam, etc. Many email servers have filtering rules built-in. So by simply programming a few simple rules into their email service or client program, people could have interesting direct mail delivered to their Inbox and the useless junk (probably still about 90-95% of it) sent to /dev/null – all automatically!

To be sure, email marketing is still an emerging field, but an electronic advertisement is certainly more environmentally friendly than a paper one; and to be sure, consumers could be saved a lot of aggravation if digital logic could be applied to the sorting of marketing messages. So why not go electronic? I'm game.

While we're at it, let's examine telemarketing and consider the less-intrusive alternatives. I might also write about investment reports, bank statements, and other excessive mailings at a later date.

FeedBurner Migration Troubles on feeds.swrobotics.com

Image by rudolf_schuba via FlickrI didn't exactly blog about it outright, but I do remember expressing a reasonable amount of uncertainty when I announced that I moved my FeedBurner account to Google's servers. Yes I am an early adopter; the deadline may not be until the end of February, but do you really want to make something of it? Apparently Google did.

As part of the migration process, I had to ask the DNS administrator for swrobotics.com (I wish I could do things like this myself, but I can't) to change the entry for the feeds subdomain from feeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com. — the easy-peasy old way — to <special-sub-sub-sub-domain>.feedproxy.ghs.google.com. — the (unnecessarily, I think) long new way.

The change seemed like a simple matter, and indeed I was emailed back the next day with a note that the modification was complete. Google, though, seems to have a glitch. Trying to access the feed at its usual home (feeds.swrobotics.com/swrobotics) turned up an error: "404 Server Not Found".

Research I did tonight turned up a thread on Google Groups with a solution to the annoying 404 Server Not Found errors I was getting. Apparently there are widespread issues with preexisting MyBrand (what FeedBurner's Custom Domain feature is referred to as) domain configurations. The easy solution is to deactivate the MyBrand service and re-enter the settings. Seconds after I implemented this fix, I was pulling up the feed once more.

So the moral of the story is, don't trust that automatic migration tools like FeedBurner's will fix everything up exactly right. Sometimes, hacks, kludges, and/or workarounds will be necessary to make sure things work properly.

Telemarketing Loopholes: FAIL

Image by elh70 via FlickrI was relaxing at home in the evening on the Monday before Thanksgiving, around 19:30, looking through a Hebrew-English dictionary to try and figure out what the song title "הלב שלנו" means in English. (I never did find the meaning of the word הלב; it seems to be conspicuously absent from both dictionaries I possess.) But an interruption was about to occur.

The phone rang.

Normally that would be a simple matter – just pick up the phone, read the Caller ID, and decide whether or not to answer it – but this situation was remarkable in that Caller ID is unavailable at my house. Put more correctly, Caller ID is a subscription service that we do not subscribe to. The cost is several dollars per month, and the phones at home aren't used enough to justify the expense.

So, I must answer the call without knowing who is on the other end. It's usually either GrandCentral or my mother, but this time it's a "robot" call. A recorded voice begins speaking to me. On the off-chance that I will be hanging up on a real person who might at some point ask an actual question, I stay on the line.

I needn't have bothered. Upon coming to a spot in the text where a changing date is to be inserted, the voice pauses, changes, and continues in a vastly different tone. I hung up before the original voice could return.

For a fact, I know that the number I answered is almost certainly on the Do Not Call List, which is supposed to prohibit marketing calls. The only problem is, there's a loophole. Non-profit organizations, pollsters, and political campaigns seem to be allowed to dial blacklisted numbers without fear of repercussions. The content of this particular call is irrelevant; the fact remains that this is not the first time, and will not be the last.

Denying the possibility of prohibiting unsolicited telephone calls altogether (a most appealing option, actually), I honestly believe that there should be an option for numbers on the Do Not Call List (or a second list for the purpose) to block all unsolicited calls, whether made by computer or human. In addition, Caller ID should be a standard feature on all telephone lines, with no extra charge. (See "Caller ID Should Be Standard" for more in-depth coverage.)

With respect to blocking all unsolicited calls, some of us just don't want to be bothered by such an intrusive device unless we know the caller, personally or professionally. If you want to sell me something, convince me to vote for you in an election, or gain my good will and receive a donation of some sort, please take your marketing elsewhere. Interrupt me while I'm on the Internet. No, I do not mean that you should spam me or add me to an email list; I would find such practices just as annoying as unsolicited telephone calls. I mean you should advertise. Buy spots in Google AdWords or something.

See, I don't object to you getting your message out, but rather to the way you're going about doing so. The Internet provides a medium where a) people are used to being interrupted by ads, so they will be automatically less disruptive, and b) there is increased likelihood of your ad being relevant. A random telephone call is most definitely less relevant than a Web ad placed near text that relates to what is being advertised.

Feel free to ask me to donate clothing to your cause, vote for your candidate, or buy the latest and greatest in window-blind technology; just do it in a way that doesn't waste my time or interrupt something I'm already doing.

Feed Address Changed [Maintenance]

Image via CrunchBaseFor those reading this site via the feed, this is just a heads-up that the feed address has changed due to my FeedBurner account being migrated to Google. Email subscribers are unaffected; all that's changed is the link I have here on the site, in the sidebar, for new subscribers.

If the address you subscribe to is on this domain (i.e. has voyagerfan5761.blogspot.com in it), you're all set. If you subscribe to the one on feeds.feedburner.com, you're set, too; but I don't know how long Google will keep the redirect up, so change feeds to feeds2 just to be safe.

Personally, I don't know why the addresses have to change, especially when the change is so trivial. It's possible that, once all accounts are migrated, the old addresses will again become the default, or there might be further changes (perhaps to feedproxy.google.com or something like that).

Given all this uncertainty, my suggestion for feed-subscribing readers who want to ensure uninterrupted delivery would be to change whatever feed currently in your reader to http://voyagerfan5761.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default so any future changes will be taken care of as quickly as I can update my settings. I say "would be" because I'm considering moving to my own domain name, which would complicate things even further. Since I don't plan to stop using FeedBurner, http://feeds2.feedburner.com/voyagerfan5761 is probably the best bet.

Comments On Google Changes

Image via WikipediaOn Wednesday, Google announced changes to or shutdowns of several services. Google also shut down Lively, the 3D chatroom that I always looked upon as a rather silly Second Life knock-off, beginning January 1—just a few short weeks ago. ("Reasons Google should kill Lively" was actually a topic in my to-blog list for several months, but it looks like I didn't have to blog about it for Google to see that it wasn't a good fit with their other projects. Nice work saving effort there, self. :P Anyway...)

I'm rather unconcerned with the fate of Google Catalog Search, which was (I believe) really just a good way to work on the OCR technology Google now uses in Book Search. (Catalog Search's former homepage at catalogs.google.com now redirects to Google's main site.) I never used it; catalogs are pretty useless these days anyway what with online shopping and Froogle (now known by the much-less-punny appellation of Google Product Search and accessed by a link in the Google header called "Shopping", though I wish they'd bring back the old name).

Image via CrunchBaseAlso of little real consequence to me, personally, is the development stoppage on Google Notebook. I don't use it much, and my service will be unaffected anyway. Well, relatively unaffected, at any rate. When I do use Notebook, it's usually in conjunction with the "Clip" function of the accompanying Firefox extension—which will no longer work. But the service will continue for now as long as one already has an account.

I'm actually somewhat glad to hear of Dodgeball.com closing and Jaiku being open-sourced. Dodgeball was a premature service somewhat like Brightkite—which I occasionally use—that stagnated almost immediately after being acquired by Google in 2005. Its interface has always been phone-only (Brightkite allows use via text message, Web interface, or iPhone/iPod-Touch–optimized site). In my opinion, Google would do well to encourage Dodgeball's users to move to Brightkite. An agreement with Brightkite to ease the transition for users willing to make the switch would likely make Dodgeball's death as swift and painless as possible.

Image via CrunchBaseJaiku has also stagnated, the most notable annoyance being that it has been invite-only since its acquisition in 2007. With the transition to open-source (the service will continue to be run by a team of volunteer Googlers), Laconica might get some new features, competition, or perhaps both. Twitter may also be encouraged to develop long-overdue features like OAuth support, since Jaiku is slated to support OAuth right out of the gate when it is released to the open-source community. (Securely logging into Twitter from third-party applications and websites has long been a point of contention in the community, because the only option continues to be giving every app your username and password. Not a very secure solution, especially because there isn't even the layer of security provided by API keys such as used by FriendFeed and, yes, Jaiku. Google itself has supported OAuth authentication for its own services since as long as I can remember.)

Overall I think Jaiku's fate is the best and most (potentially) beneficial of all those announced this week. The potential for competition and improvement in the entire microblogging and status-update ecosystem is wonderful. However, potential users of the newly–open-sourced Jaiku Engine (hopefully that's the address where it will live—it 404s at the moment, but I'll watch and update if necessary) will still be dependent upon other Google amenities, namely Google App Engine. Jaiku was ported to App Engine last year, and the code base is now dependent upon being run in that environment. (This could be a ploy to get money, since App Engine charges—or will charge; I'm not sure of the time frame of the fee structure—nominal fees for applications that move beyond moderate-scale deployment—not a bad business move, if I do say so myself.)

Image via WikipediaThe one impending closure that I am really and truly saddened by is the shutdown of uploads to Google Video, which is now (and will shortly be, but for already-uploaded content) solely a meta–video-search site. I've always preferred Google Video to YouTube for a variety of reasons. Some of them are:

• cleaner interface
• more professional player appearance (nice for embedding on sites like swrobotics.com)
• especially the lack of related videos and pop-down search bar
  
• less cluttered site
• fewer extraneous features
• more focus on videos, less on social networking
  

(As an aside, there is also some uncertainty how the closure will affect users of Blogger who use the platform's video upload feature, which uses Google Video for hosting. I have never uploaded a video for a post through Blogger, so I'm somewhat detached from this particular concern—but I thought it was relevant nonetheless.)

I have many more reasons and thoughts on this comparison that I can't easily articulate, but I will be very sad to lose the ability to add new content to Google Video. Failing the motivation to deal with YouTube (which has limits on content length and filesize that may or may not be lifted in the aftermath of Video's shutdown), I suppose I might have to start uploading somewhere else entirely, like Vimeo (whose player I like quite a bit).

YouTube has always kind of irked me as a place to upload content. It's a great place to go to watch videos, almost always, but for hosting videos intended for display on another site... Despite the number of sites that do so, its player has always seemed out of place on the sites I'm involved with. The in-built social network (which includes profile pages, a messaging feature, "friendship", and so forth) has always seemed like an unnecessary layer to me.

I suppose I should have seen the writing on the wall when Google's own blogs, which used Google Video uploads themselves for a while even after the YouTube acquisition, all switched over to YouTube videos and left Google Video in the dust. Maybe I'm a video Scrooge, or maybe I'm just being resistant to change (who isn't?). Whatever the reason, I—honest and truly—will miss being able to add my videos to such a simplistically elegant site as Google Video has been.

Update (19:46): Some good news (depending on how you look at it) came this week, too: FeedBurner now shows a link to migrate your account to Google on the My Feeds page. That wasn't there a couple days ago...

Caller ID Should Be Standard

Image via WikipediaI don't particularly like using the telephone.

Don't get me wrong; it's nothing against the concept of talking to someone who's not there – I do that all the time online. It's not the fact that it's voice-based instead of text-based. (Actually it kind of is, but that's not the point of this post.)

One of the biggest reasons I don't like telephones is that it's sometimes impossible to know who's on the other end of the line. Caller ID is considered a premium feature and carries a charge somewhere in the area of $5/month per line. (This doesn't apply to cell phones, which have it built in. I'm strictly discussing landlines here.) Since when is knowing who's trying to contact you a privilege, not a right?

I know, I know; it takes resources, it's relatively new. Telephones have been around in concept since the mid-1800s; Caller ID was conceived in the late 1960s. But let me tell you something: Flash memory was first presented at the IEEE conference in 1984 by a Japanese employee of Toshiba, who invented the technology in 1980. Prices for that technology have fallen steeply in just ten years.

How about some perspective? For as long as I can remember (five years or so, in this case), Caller ID has been a good $5-$10 per month. It hasn't changed, either, as far as I know. By comparison, flash memory prices started at a good $100 or more for a few megabytes when my mother got her first digital camera (which took the no-longer-developed SmartMedia memory card) and are now down to $100-$150 for 16GB. That hardly seems fair, considering that both prices are for technological innovations that usually depreciate very rapidly.

Perhaps the lack of price decrease for Caller ID is caused by similar factors to those which create the sky-high fees on SMS messages. That is to say, carrier greed. (I also notice that landline telcos don't include long-distance calling as part of the phone line price, but that's a whole 'nother subject; I won't go there.)

So what if Caller ID was standard? Sure it might raise the basic price of a phone line a dollar or two, but that would be better than paying the ridiculous rates currently charged to have it as an add-on feature. (I'm taking a page from my economic experience that says package deals are always cheaper than a la carte options. Not saying that's always true; it's just a good rule of thumb.)

If I had Caller ID on every phone, I could look at it and answer or not answer based on who's calling, without paying extra, and gain more confidence in answering landline phones. (It's debatable whether landlines are even still useful what with prepaid cell phones and all that, but sometimes they're required for alarm systems. In which case being able to use them as intended is a nice bonus.)

And all this because I hate listening to telemarketers and recorded messages. Huh. Fancy that: Marketing makes me hate the medium on which it is delivered. Same as commercial television and radio (I spy a future post idea...) – but not the Internet; I can block ads on the Internet faster than you can say, "I hate advertisements."