I heard this news first on the radio this morning, and was glad to see the article on CNN: CNN.com - Groups?unite to fight bulk e-mail fee - Feb 28, 2006

I think it's inevitable that bulk emailers (and thus spammers) will eventually end up paying for the privilege of emailing everyone on the planet several times a day.

Two points in this article stood out to me:

"We cannot pay for the service, we don't have the money," Frydman said. "We have been doing this for 11 years based on the standards of Internet communication. Those standards do not include paying for service. This one company is trying to transform unilaterally how the Internet works."

My response to this would be: things change. Times change. It's really no different than a company offering a free service for several months and, once they're proven their business model (and, not incidentally, hooked you on it), start charging for it.

No one is proposing (at least not yet) that every piece of email that anyone sends be charged. And even here, they're not proposing that anyone be required to pay to send email--they're saying that if you pay, then you get preferential treatment, like almost everything else in this world.

Or like free, limited trials of software--if you can make do with the "lite" version, many times you can get it free. If you want the full-featured version, you're required to pay for it.

The other comment that I thought was interesting was this one:

"We're a grassroots organization," said William Green, president of RightMarch.com. "We're not funded by big donors. If we're sending 2 to 3 million e-mails a week, paying a penny per e-mail will price us out."

Well, frankly, hallellujah.

I'm all for free speech, but when I get home and have to wade through several hundred emails to find a half dozen real ones, or spend an entire evening configuring the spam filters on my email client, it makes me wonder. Or when I pay $1.50/hour at the internet café in Mexico to download 850 messages after I've been offline for two days, just so I can see if there are any problems at work I need to take care of.

My opinion is that free speech doesn't include 850 people throwing something at me every day that I'm expected to catch and deal with. There's junk snail mail, too, of course, but since they do have to pay for that, it ends up being about 3-4 pieces a day, not the hundreds of spam emails that someone like me who has been on the internet a long time gets.

I'm trying an experiment with Google AdSense, placing some Google ads on my various weblogs. If it turns out to be a waste of space, I'll take them off, but I thought it might be worth finding out. Hopefully they won't be too intrusive.

Maybe I'm overreacting, but this sounds like a hateful headline to me:

CNN.com - Sheryl Crow undergoes cancer surgery - Feb 24, 2006: "Although she split from cyclist Lance Armstrong, singer Sheryl Crow got a taste of what her ex-fiance went through during his battle against cancer."

People in my office are talking about the Olympics, and I had to put the headphones on so I wouldn't hear them! I'm playing Ryan Adams, loud. Not that I really care, I guess, but I don't especially want to know who won until I see the event. La la la, I can't HEAR you . . . .

This is interesting: Interactive Johari Window - Describe willa. I've never seen this before. The site says:

The Johari Window was invented by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingram in the 1950s as a model for mapping personality awareness. By describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up.

I've picked six adjectives that I believe describe me; you can go and pick some, too, and then we can see if they overlap.

Link from nakedjen

(Possibly unnecessary warning -- there is nudity at the nakedjen site.)