I’ve been creating email newsletters either for myself or for clients for probably about 8 years.
I started designing these things back when I was heavily into promoting The Site at MANOVERBOARD and gathered steam with about 400 subscribers. I created simple HTML emails that would highlight the artist being exhibited on The Site and then I would send them out from my 14K or 56K modem 20 or 30 at a time until they were delivered. My ISP at the time (Interport, long live Interport) couldn’t handle more than 30 emails at a time.
The Site is now more or less kaput and has run out of steam on its own (my own?) accord. In any case, I’ve used a number of good to average online email marketing solutions to send emails for MANOVERBOARD and for many clients over the past 3 years. There has been mixed success. The statistics one can gain from tracking emails sent to your loyal followers is insanely detailed; what I mean is that an email sender typically knows a tremendous amount of information about the quality of the emails they are sending by looking at the “open” and “click-through” rates of those emails. Some server-side email software can also tell you what visitors clicked on what links, which is both scary and cool if you’re a senstive marketer like me.
Regardless, I’ve found a new email newsletter home at CampaignMonitor which seems to totally rock. I’ve had a few successes with it and I’m relaunching The Telegraph, a MANOVERBOARD newsletter that has sadly been in winter hibernation because of a project called Overload (see previous post). Long story long, Seth Godin wrote a short, cogent piece last week about email marketing and he’s spot on: good marketing takes time, knowing your audience, catering to their needs and whims, and being consistent. What more is there? I’m planning on re-applying this idea to all my newfound email projects with my new email newsletter application.
[For a future post: Commentary and explication of the dearth of solid, useful information on the Web about email marketing, email technologies, HTML vs text emails, email clients, and email delivery systems.]

Not enough commentators and news organizations have picked up on what I consider a big story: the near possibility of a $100 laptop that would allow billions of poor schoolchildren around the world to connect to the Internet. Journalist Kevin Maney, of USA Today, pushed this story a few weeks ago, driven by the Davos Forum and Nicholas Negroponte a few weeks ago. Large companies have rightly signed on to push the technology forward; they include Google, AMD and possibly Samsung and Motorola.
Slashdot, BoingBoing, and many others have noted the story weakly. To me, it’s a fascinating construct and one that could be more than confabulatory if all of the positives really came out. The standard reasoning among many promoters is that the $100 laptop would allow potentially violent young insurgents to see how “cool” the West is and forgo their anger and hatred of all things Western (this myopia seems contingent upon the seductiveness of video games for some reason). Others see the pure economic benefits of, say, a Nigerian woman being able to sell her handmade items on eBay. Still others focus on the educational aspect of the $100 laptop, allowing students in developing countries to learn more deeply than they could have before.
It also seems that there are many micro-economic effects that the $100 laptop could have on our global culture and economy as well:

• Because the proposed systems would be open source based (to save costs and ongoing fees), programmers in any country could join the front in creating reliable, strong, and usable software.
• Small high-tech firms could reproduce the product within their countries, providing jobs and social structures in small communities.
• Innovation would be pushed open across the board. Rather than one set of hard-drive technologies being focused upon consistently, for instance, other kinds of memory devices and systems could be explored.
• The need for new phone systems (mobile or landline) could essentially be eliminated in small, hard-to-reach areas as VOIP could be used among the poorest to communicate.
• Medical facillities and other information-critical organizations would be greatly assisted with the advance of ready-to-use technical assistance provided online.
• Whole economies could tie into the Web, providing new communities and financial bases for products and goods where there were none before.

The logic of this is so clear, so pure, that it’s hard to believe an NGO or major multinational hasn’t already been started to push this project deeply. Western and Asian businesses would of course reap huge benefits with new subscribers and new audiences — as would local news organizations and academic institutions. For a foundation or major corporation, $100 million dollars towards this project would go a long, long way.