According to Masha Geller’s newsletter at MediaPost, a new DoubleClick report says: “The overall click-through rate for industry text emails was 7%, while Html emails was 10%.”

Say wha’?? People on average not only open 7-10% of their spam but actually click on links in them? No wonder I’m getting so much spam! Will you morons stop clicking already?? You’re ruining it for the rest of us!

Here’s the overall clickthrough percentages by industry:

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The LA Times has run an article, by David Streitfeld, about Lawrence Lessig and his crusade for reasonable copyright laws. Great reading. And, as Doc has pointed out, this is published right in the heart of the Copyright Cops, the Rustlers on the Commons, the Vandals of Fair Use, i.e., Hollywood.

Among the good points: Lessig uses Walt Disney as his poster boy since Disney himself took advantage of stories that had passed into the public domain as the basis for his early cartoon successes. And, Lessig tells about Sony’s lawyers informing an owner of an Aibo robotic dog that he is not permitted to reprogram it to dance to jazz.

Then there’s this bit of insight:

Studying under the long shadow of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the dark prince of Cambridge philosophers, Lessig learned that the way to influence a seemingly intractable debate was by reframing it, getting both sides to confront something they hadn’t seen before. It’s a technique that has served him well in the Eldred case. =

Most unexpected fact: “Lessig was a professional singer as a child…”

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Chris Gaither has a delightful account in The Boston Globe of a 14-hour email riot among students and relatives at Wesleyan University. A msg with a typo got sent to an administrative mailing list. As people tried unsuccessfully to unsubscribe, others told them that if everyone just shut up, traffic on the mailing list would cease. Others took it as an opportunity to goof. 300,000 msgs later, the list was shut down.

An anomaly, yes. And what do we conclude from it, hmm?

Note: The Globe will lock up the link after a few days.

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Andrius Kulikauskas couldn’t take it any more. A general-purpose list we’re on together has been going on about the coming war against Iraq, slowly descending into “How dare you insinuate”s and “If you just want to pose and exaggerate, then go ahead”s. He replied with this long message about his personal experience speaking truth to power, and truth to fear, and truth to neediness, at the most local level.

Andrius is enough of an idealist that he is sometimes shocked by the cyncism most of us take for granted. And lord bless him for it. And he never lies. This is worth reading.

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The Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section has an excellent article by Elaine Scarry, who teaches at Harvard, on why a distributed defense makes sense. Here’s the way the headline writer put it:

FAILSAFE
On Sept. 11, passengers armed only with cell phones and courage succeeded where a multibillion-dollar military failed. Does their achievement mean that 50 years of American defense policy is all wrong?

After a careful and persuasive analysis of what worked (bottom-up action coordinated via cellphones and loved ones) and what didn’t (centralized defense via scrambling jet fighters) on Sept. 11 after the first planes hit, Scarry enlarges the idea to nuclear policy, concluding that the world will not give up these “monarchic weapons” (because they are to be used without any consent by the citizenry) until the U.S. does.

The Ideas section of the Sunday Globe is only two weeks old, an expansion of the intellectual content of the journal after it contracted its book section a few months ago. Scarry’s article is exactly the sort of piece that will make this section work: provocative without extremism, broadening in scope as it moves along rather than narrowing to details, and very nicely written.

Note: The Globe locks up its content after a few days because it would rather make a few bucks than be a continuing presence in the world’s global conversation.

In poking around the Web about Scarry, I immediately found an interview with her (by David Bowman) at Salon about the relationship of beauty and justice. What a remarkable thinker.

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My e-pal Gilbert Cattoire has joined Annotis.com, an outfit that provides a toolbar for your mail client that lets you do all sorts of funky things to your HTML-based email, like add customized stamps, highlight text, annotate text and add sticky notes. The recipient doesn’t have to use Annotis to see what you’ve done, of course. It costs $25, and there’s a 30-day free trial. Only Outlook and Outlook Express users need apply at this time.

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From Jonathan Arnold on a mailing list comes a rudely funny link: Taliban Reunited.

Dick Joltes, from the same list, recommends the latest in innovative services for today’s highly leveraged executives: Cadaver, Inc.

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The FX cable channel, owned by Rupert Murdoch, plans to do an “American Idol” style show where the winner doesn’t get to perform live on the Regis show but does get to run for president, according to an AP article:

The cable channel announced on Friday the start of a series, “American Candidate,” designed to pick a TV-endorsed potential president.

“We think it’s a marriage of a tried-and-true concept, as shown by ‘American Idol,’ with a down-home political spin to it,” said Peter Liguori, FX president. “We are a nation where, quote-unquote, anybody can become president, and this is a concept that gives everyday folks a forum to express their point of view and have people respond to it.”

R.J. Cutler, the filmmaker who made “The War Room,” a documentary on the 1992 Clinton campaign, is producing the project with Jay Roach, director of the “Austin Powers” movies.

Just when you think it couldn’t get any fucking stranger.

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From Euan Semple of The Obvious:

I don’t know about you but I for one have got so much from the hard
work of Mark Wood in putting together one of the best and most
rewarding blogs on the web. Mark is without access to a computer at the
moment. I reckon if even 100 people payed $5 each we could get him a
computer of his own. I’ve set up a PayPal account and a link from my
blog for donations. I will ensure that Mark gets all money donated.

You’ll find a PayPal button conveniently on The Obvious site.

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I’ve captured from The Daily Show the clip of W struggling to say “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Notice the look of abject fear as he realizes that he’s going to muff it and it’s going to end up on the news, and on damn fool weblogs.

And so it has.

Higher res version of Windows Media file (wmv) (2.2MB) for broader band users
Low res version of Windows Media file (wmv) (322K) for dial-up users
Real Video (217K) if you have the Real Player

MPG (880KB) for dialup users
Higher-res MPG (1.3MB) for broadband users

QuickTime (MOV) (381K) Best clarity per bit. (Thanks, Kevin Marks.)

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