The Spam Act and the Future of the Web
Thursday 18 August - an article in the Financial Review titled, "Spam-sending tipster Global Racing Group backs the wrong horse" by Rachel Lebihan reports on the latest activities of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in it's fight against spam, particularly in the time since the Spam Act has come into force in April 2004. Since that time five businesses have been fined for spamming. In one case, Global Racing Group have been fined $11,000 for sending more than 50,000 unsolicited text messages. Interestingly the company that was contracted to distribute the messages, Australian SMS, was also fined $2200.
The Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts provide a number of guides for small business that can help ensure that your practices fall within the law: http://www.dcita.gov.au/ie/spam_home. The three key steps involved are:
- Consent - you need to have consent from the person to whom you are sending your message.
- Identify - you should clearly identify who is responsible for sending the message and how to contact them.
- Unsubscribe - your messages should contain an unsubscribe facility to enable the receipient to unsubscribe.
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Tuesday 23rd August - Financial Review included a special section on Information titled "Internet: 1995-2005". Amongst the articles there is a beauty written by Mark Jones titled, "E-volution: you ain't seen nothin' net". In his article, Mark talks about the new "remix generation", who are "time poor but desperate to be information rich at the click of a button". What are your thoughts on that?
 Interesting to point out from Mark's article is that there seems to be an evolving view by experts that "the web of the future will ultimately coalesce around three to five internet 'mainframes'". In a way the article suggests that most of the Internet traffic will be controlled by the giants like Google, MSN and Yahoo! What's your take on that?
Mark's article also includes some figures of "Search engines' shares of searches" quoted from SearchEngineWatch, Bloomberg (May 2005):
- Google 48.0%
- Yahoo! 21.2%
- MSN 12.4%
- AOL 4.5%
- AskJeeves 2.0%
- My Way 2.0%
- Netscape 1.1%
- Others 8.8%
Here's one I found online: http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/3099931.
If you want to know more about tapping into some of that traffic, here's an article we have published that we recommend reading: Search Engine Optimisation.
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