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Postage Is Due for Companies Sending E-Mail — Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers. — America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts …
Discussion:
Mark Evans, Boing Boing, Rough Type, A VC, TeleRead, Microsoft News Tracker, Smalltalk Tidbits … and robhyndman.com
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Bye Bye Email Marketing, Hello RSS — Saul Hansell at the New York Times reports that America Online and Yahoo are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered.

Increasingly, Internet's Data Trail Leads to Court
Discussion:
VoIP Blog

CoComment: Tracking Your Blog Comments — CoComment is experimenting with a new way for people to keep track of all of the comments they leave on various blogs. — To use CoComment, a user must install a bookmarklet on their browser and use that bookmarklet, instead of the blog interface, to leave a comment.
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Track your comments, no matter where you make them — Let's say you track 10 blogs and you regularly post comments on all 10 blogs. Isn't it a pain in the behind that you have to go around to each of the 10 blogs to participate in the comments? — Well, minutes ago Laurent Haug showed us a service …
Discussion:
It's Rishi, mathewingram.com/work, BrianShih.com, Things That, Raw and Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Blogs — it's all about the conversation — This may or may not be part of the "secret sauce" in Gabe's memeorandum.com, but I think Stowe Boyd is onto something. In a post about what makes blogs work — i.e., what makes them vibrant and helps them grow, as opposed to stagnating …
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First Take: 30 Boxes — I am joining in the chorus of praise for 30 Boxes (along with Scoble, Thomas Hawk (who calls it the best calendar ever), Matt Mullenweg, and Om, who called 30 boxes the gmail of calendars) even though I have only fooled with it for a few hours.

Microsoft Search Champs: Payola or just a good conference? — Our geeky sister was one of over 50 techies invited to Microsoft Search Champs V4. Attendees in the company's Redmond base heard about the new technologies in Vista. And the "Evil Empire" was quite kind to its visitors.

Software-defined radio could unify wireless world — A device capable of skipping between incompatible wireless standards by tweaking its underlying code has been given world's first go-ahead for outdoor trials in Ireland. — Ireland's communications regulator Comreg has issued the licence …

German BMW Banned From Google — BMW.de as seen from Google: — PageRank zero and a "sorry" page. — From what it looks like, the German websites of car maker BMW have been kicked out of the Google index. BMW.de at this time has a PageRank of 0. A search for BMW Germany …

Cable companies fear the approach of IPTV — In the flip side of the stories coming out about giant IP service providers worrying over squeezing more profits, the world of cable television has started to wonder if their future revenue might suffer from the rise of Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV.
Discussion:
VoIP Now

Goodbye to All This — What a Long, Opinionated Trip It's Been — Over the course of my nearly 10 years as Outlook editor, I witnessed the demise of the mass media. — Oh, there's plenty of media — more than ever before. And there's plenty of mass — readers consume more information in more ways than ever before.
Discussion:
Bloggers Blog

New Microsoft Windows Tools in the Wings — SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft's "Sparkle" is set to get some new cousins. — Following up on its recent release of the first preview of Sparkle, its designer tool for creating applications for Windows Vista and the Web, the company is currently …

Balancing The Business of MySpace — Reporter's Notebook It's not hard to picture a typical teenager in the Internet era: home from school, heading straight for the bedroom, door slammed tight and off to another world, online. — Once there, she listens to music, chats in real time …
Discussion:
benbarren.blogspot.com

Internet tycoons left red-faced by £30 tab — THE billionaire owners of Google, the internet search engine, were caught short in Rio when a local restaurant rejected their credit card. — Google's owners, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had spent three days in Brazil visiting …
Discussion:
Valleywag

Xbox Live Arcade GM Jabs Nintendo, Sony — Xbox Live Arcade group manager Greg Canessa (pictured) tells Next Generation that retro downloadable Nintendo games "won't hold up", and as far as a Sony online service goes... "good luck". — Since it was first conceived as a humble disc for the original Xbox …