AOL and Yahoo may start charging commercial users fractions of a cent to deliver e-mail.

See stories here: Slashdot Clickz

And while you might think this is outrageous- it’s actually a good thing. The Can-Spam act has done virtually nothing to stop SPAM and to increase the effectiveness of direct marketing through e-mail, many people you’ve opted-in for mailings- have pushed way too much junk your into your inbox.

The solution is already here- it’s called RSS. I’ve written several posts about it already- most recently “A site without RSS is like a phone without a ringer.”

RSS allows your customers to choose when to see what new and interesting things you have on your site- and to visit at their leisure. Smart marketers will soon offer different RSS feeds to different types of customers- with different deals on different products. For now, the key is adding RSS to your site- no matter what (WordPress does this automatically).

To read some interesting views on how to make RSS simpler to use see:

Dave Winer “How RSS can bust through” 

Fred Wilson “E-mail vs RSS (Continued)”

While what I’ve read about AOL and Yahoo’s plans seems heavy handed, something has to be done to eliminate junk e-mail- and this is one option.  I remember seeing a proposal not long ago about requiring a secure type certificate for every e-mail server that would be revoked if too many spam complaints were lodged against that server. Earthlink implemented a barrier that would require a response to send e-mail to protected addresses that was highly effective during an outbreak of one really horrible virus a year or so ago. This is not the first time a radical solution has been suggested.

The best spam fighting solution I have seen is the Spam Karma 2 plug-in for WordPress that works through the collective wisdom of a shared knowledge base. It would seem that if implemented Internet wide- this type of Spam filter would quickly stop the current deluge.

This site is less than 4 months old today.

The amazing thing is that it is already drawing over 100 unique visitors a day- and if it keeps going at this rate of growth, will quickly leave The Next Wave site in the dust (which is averaging 60 unique visitors a day). Note: The Next Wave site has been up since 1994 in some shape or form and has a lot of great content.

When we added the WordPress blog to The Next Wave site- we were averaging about 200 unique visitors a month! And this was with a code compliant site- that was built with search in mind. The difference was in how difficult it was to update the site with new content- simple additions could take hours. WordPress- or any actively served Content Management System makes changes take minutes- by someone with no HTML knowledge at all.

Granted, everyone is interested in blogging and easy site creation right now- and this subject is “so much sexier” than great advertising- but, the key is- building a site in WordPress isn’t only cheaper- it’s much better at doing what a good site is supposed to do- attract visitors.

This is why attending one of our “Blogosopher” (or “Blogosphere” as so many keep reading it) seminars can help you build a web site that can begin generating hits so much faster than an expensive hand-coded website.

WordPress Development Blog › 2.0.1 Release

It’s here. As always .0 releases of software soon have .1 attached- and often .2 soon after. Some of the quirky behavior in the dashboard has been addressed. Time will tell in the next few days if more problems have surfaced.