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I hope it never happens. I hope Microsoft is not going to swallow Yahoo. I clearly don’t care that MS is going to drain its resources by the acquisition and by the crusade to rewrite the whole Yahoo world in ASP.NET. I find it really sad that Yahoo is going to be killed.

One of the Internet pioneers, the only old giant still alive and making good products. Yes, it suffered from mismanagement by Terry Semel but hey, shit happens. They can survive it, I hope this hostile bid is also the case.

Folks get rid of your MSFT and YHOO stock if the transaction goes through.

Finally it got settled down with Feedburner. This service actually delivers new posts to email. This easy task didn’t seem to be executed by previously tried services.

Except for that feedburner also provides an overwhelming bunch of useful functionality like embedding interaction in feeds, gathering subscribers statistics, inserting subscribe links and such.

The only thing I slightly dislike is that Feedsmith plugin puts feedburner’s links in the feed to redirect to actual posts. This is probably to count statistics, and I see it as necessary evil.

Thumbs up, Feedburner. Google knew what it did when they acquired the service. Finally, Skalfa blog is equipped with what it needs for a more serious customer communication approach and all product blogs integration.

A lot of internet companies adopted blogging systems for news/press purposes, and a lot of internet users learned how to read RSS. This is the new, truly democratic way of syndicating and personalizing content.

The problem is that effective volumes of internet users still don’t know (or don’t want to learn) how to use new technologies. That is why direct email marketing is still relevant and is going to kick long years forward. Nothing can in visible future fully replace news delivery right to one’s inbox regardless of the curvy roads it walks - obscure SPAM/not-SPAM definition.

This leads us to the idea that one of the most useful services around the RSS phenomena nowadays is RSS to email delivery. A lot of users appreciate old and familiar newsletter subscription form instead of learning what the heck to do with your feed URL and how to use RSS readers. This is crucial to remember if your business depends on those not tech savvy. I’m speaking of old timers - usually a very purchase-driven audience.

When reviewing several RSS-to-email services I found r|mail. It does what it supposed to do right on the homepage in the best manner of Web 2.0 services. This very post is to test their delivery

Oct 12 update: No email from rmail. Trying out other services.

Oct 15 update: This time it’s great with rssfwd. Feel free to check this service. We’re putting this to skalfa.com index page with the nearest site update.

I received an email notification about a new CMS.

Not another joomla or wordpress, it’s a simple service allowing to create and edit pieces of formatted text to paste into webpages easily. It surely is a useful service with a great idea behind. Probably it’s going to fly, but I just didn’t like the way it’s taking off. It was plain email spam because I never subscribed to their mailing list. One person commented about that and they responded with a message like “send email to feedback@domain and we’ll unsubscribe you”. Hmm… questionable marketing practice in the world of spammers starting getting into jail.

There are better ways to promote your products. No matter how good they are you can’t just rush into one’s inbox being sure it’s going to be appreciated. Even myspace spam is more tolerable than a good old unsolicited “great news” email. Shame on you.

Cool service. What I find especially cool about it is that it allows to do nothing and still benefit. You download a desktop application spying your musical tracks being played and telling the service about them. So, last.fm knows what you listen to and dares suggest something new as well as connect you with other members.

Personally, I only use it as a log of what I listen to. Putting a widget on this blog was really easy and now I have a self-refreshing playlist watch for those interested. For a busy(lazy?) type such as myself it’s really a turn-on. How do you guys use last.fm?

On the business side of things it’s a really smart idea to help people benefit without any noticeable time/emotion commitment from their side. This is very important in today’s chaos of websites trying to win your attention and time. Also, it deals with music, something of the very few things that youngsters are ready to pay for. Thus an affiliate deal with a CD-selling third party really changes financial situation for a company of a last.fm scale. Keep up the good work guys!