Our Ideas
Tips for Successful Email Campaigns
Email has become an expedient, cost-effective way to deliver marketing messages to targeted audiences, but its explosive growth has been met with mixed response. Overwhelmed by a flood of daily emails, companies and individuals are increasingly relying on automated tools to filter out the glut of emails landing in inboxes. And fed-up email users are going even further, sometimes labeling any unsolicited email as SPAM and even going so far as to file abuse complaints against the senders. Currently there are no widely-accepted rules, practices, policies or laws that help the legitimate marketer make the right choice for sending out a proper marketing campaign using email. Legitimate marketers are struggling to adapt to the anti-SPAM hysteria and are looking for guidelines for reaching their audience using email without being accused of being a spammer. Media Net Link has spent the past three years designing and developing a web-based email...
Culture Shifts
Fifteen years ago, as a member of the Electronic Network Association (ENA), I chaired a session at their annual conference. A forerunner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the two organizations had many common members. My session included many experts in the field of research, collaboration and human computer interaction. The session also included Carrie Tibbs, a middle school teacher from the San Francisco Bay Area that used National Georgraphic Kids Network to teach science to her students. Kids would do acid rain experiments, and then upload their data to a central server, where the results would be compared against results from other parts of the country. The program was way cool on many levels, teaching the kids about issues on a global scale - from the importance of taking good measurements, to more secondary lessons in collaboration and global ecology. Note that this was before the Web! Freeman Dyson was...
Dealing With Database Differences
One of the common debates in database programming is whether to write your code for a specific type of database (such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server) or instead to use a middle software layer to help abstract the logic so that you can use the same application with multiple vendor's databases. Those that want to port their applications from one database to another or who need to write a cross platform application will need to make some design decisions at the beginning of a project or do some research when it comes time to port. In a recent project at Media Net Link, we decided to provide AthenaRMS, our help desk application, as open source and make it cross platform so that a potential user could use one of the free databases like Postgres or MySQL, or, if corporate requirements mandated, their corporate Oracle database. We chose these three...