bruceb news

If all goes well, Mad Mimi is going to take over the mailing list for subscribers to Bruceb News. Here’s the story that led me to the odd logo on the left.

If you send an email message to more than 25 people, most of them won’t receive it. The message will be filtered as spam and tossed into a junk mail folder.

Vertical Response and Constant Contact have made a nice business out of handling mailing lists for businesses that send out email blasts regularly. When I’ve used them in the past, they had all the hallmarks of tools for big companies – lots and lots of options, infinite flexibility, complicated controls for layout and design, sophisticated analytics for judging the success of email campaigns, and much more. […] continued

There is a fascinating and informative series of articles by a lawyer and former federal prosecutor about his efforts to unearth information about a scammer who sent a phony “invoice” to his firm. It’s a well-known and simple scam – send something that looks like an invoice for a service that was never ordered or delivered, hoping that it will get paid by someone who doesn’t notice that it’s phony. I used to see variations on this for domain registration scams.

The author describes the series this way:

I’ve decided to dedicate some time and money to investigating this scam and the people and companies responsible for it.

[…] continued

If you live anywhere in the U.S. other than a big city, you likely have one choice – and only one choice – for broadband service.

If you live in a rural area, there is a good chance that you cannot get broadband service of any kind.

Dane Jasper, founder and CEO of Sonic.net, wrote an article a few days ago that provides a useful reminder of how the U.S. got to this position, where we lag behind many other countries in broadband penetration and speeds.

In a few words: there was robust competition in the 90s. The copper lines to your house were recognized as a natural monopoly, since you only have one phone line to the house. […] continued

[Addendum 08/13: after a day of harsh criticism, LinkedIn yanked the photos and names from their ads. There is still a checkmark that you might want to uncheck but it doesn’t feel as invasive any more.]

When web companies look at you, they don’t see people, they see wallets. You would think companies would have learned from Facebook’s long line of privacy gaffes but the lure of advertising money is too strong. LinkedIn is the latest company to experiment with the dangerous world of “opt-out” advertising.

LinkedIn decided it would be swell to serve up advertisements that include your name and your picture. […] continued

I have a story about web hosting.

When you visit brucebnews.com, all the pages pop into place instantly. Do a search or click on a link and you’ll see the result right away. That’s what you expect from a web site, right?

Until last week, that’s not what you got from my news page. It would almost always take a few seconds for a page to appear. In the middle of the day, pages might take 10-20 seconds to appear – an eternity.

There is an interesting story about what changed.

Bruceb News is built on WordPress, the publishing platform that powers a huge percentage of the blogs in the world. […] continued

The rules for online marketing change every day. Something simple, like having a web site that ranks high in Google’s search results, is turning into something barely comprehensible as search results become more individual, influenced by each person’s search history and social networks and Likes and +1s. Search engine optimization has become a dark art, complex beyond belief, far more than just sprinkling a handful of metatags into your web site header. Some of the companies offering to help you rise in the search rankings are scam artists; others provide valuable services that you could not duplicate yourself. It’s not easy to tell them apart. […] continued

You jangle your keys in your pocket next to your Motorola phone and the screen isn’t scratched. You drop your iPhone and the glass doesn’t break. You jab with an icepick over and over at a Thinkpad X1 laptop and for goodness’ sake, I hope you stop to wonder what in the world is wrong with you – but the screen isn’t damaged.

Gorilla Glass is not secret. Corning has been taking out ads for months trying to get you to notice it. It’s one of the important components of the mobile device revolution, hiding in plain sight.

Gorilla Glass is used on smartphones from HTC and Motorola and Samsung, on notebook computers from Acer and Lenovo, on tablets from Dell and Asus – more than 300 million devices worldwide, according to Corning’s official list. […] continued

Previously:
The Problem Of Saving Email

Inspired by Small City Law Firm Tech
Saving Email – It’s Just the Right Thing To Do (Outlook – All Versions)
Simply the Best, Better than All the Rest – Saving Email in an Acrobat Pro Package

Email can be gathered on an ongoing basis into a single PDF file for each case. If a law firm or business puts together a system to save email regularly and convinces everyone to use it, the result is an up to date collection of all the communications relating to a case or project, gathered into a single file that is searchable and sortable, stored with the other related documents and scans for that case. […] continued

Inspired by Small City Law Firm Tech
Saving Email – It’s Just the Right Thing To Do (Outlook – All Versions)
Simply the Best, Better than All the Rest – Saving Email in an Acrobat Pro Package

There is no easy way to gather all of the emails related to a case from all the mailboxes in a small law firm. I have studied this problem endlessly and there is no magic answer. I’m going to suggest one very appealing possibility, though, courtesy of the lovely Vivian Manning, who gave me an “Ah hah!” moment last week.

It is the holy grail for law offices, or small businesses of any kind: gathering all the information about a case or project in a single folder on the server, all the documents and scanned mail and email messages, so anyone can come up to speed on all documents and communication in a single place. […] continued

Previously:
Office 365 Part 1 – Overview
Office 365 Part 2 – The Evolution Of Exchange Online
Office 365 Part 3 – Collaboration With Sharepoint Online

The final piece of Office 365, Lync Online, is tough to summarize. The focus is on communications with co-workers as well as people outside the business. According to the website, Lync Online “transforms interactions with colleagues, customers, and partners” to a “more collaborative, engaging, and effective experience.” Well, that answers your questions, eh?

There are a myriad of features and services that can be handled by Lync. These are at the core for small businesses:

• Reports on availability of people in the company, based on their Outlook calendars.

[…] continued