"Please can we spam you? Oh, pretty please?"

Some customers of Kozmo.com, the money-losing chip, dip and Cameron Diaz-flick delivery service, received an upappetizing e-mail message this Thanksgiving. Titled "Service update for kozmo.com" the e-mail declared that "through customer feedback we heard that many of our members like you, who originally opted not to receive occasional e-mail news from us, would like to change their preference. Now, you can opt-in to our subscriber contact list via the Web site."

In other words: "Dear customer, you told us that you don't want to receive marketing spam from us, but we're hoping that you've changed your mind, so we're spamming you to find out." The message then goes on to unashamedly gush about how Kozmo.com "revolutionizes gift giving," as well as offer handy instructions on how to receive even more unsolicited marketing dreck.

The whole campaign smacks of desperation. One of the hottest trends in e-business these days is selling your customer lists to direct marketers -- but Kozmo.com, like most Web companies, is in the unhappy position of discovering that given the choice, most customers don't want their names sold.

So tell us, Kozmo.com: What part of opt-out don't you understand? Sugarcoated spam sweetly inquiring whether we'd like to receive more spam, when we've already said that we don't want it, is still spam. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [4 p.m. PST, Nov. 27, 2000]

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You say you want a revolution?

You might have thought there weren't any musicians left who hadn't already weighed in on the Napster phenomenon. The Brits, however, seem a wee bit behind the times. On Monday, Elton John and Paul McCartney became the poster children for a U.K. anti-Napster campaign, kicking off an "awareness week" called Respect the Value of Music for the British Music Rights (BMR) organization.

Do you suppose "Helter Skelter" and "Crocodile Rock" are feeling the back-catalog download pinch? A press release from BMR placed the two pop stars firmly in the Metallica camp, although it noted, "This isn't just the high-profile, high-earning music creators, but also those thousands of composers and songwriters who are not in the public eye but who depend upon the income from their work to continue making music."

Is this news to Napster users? Unlikely. At this point in the game, with a year's worth of rhetoric behind us, Napster users either know that they are stealing from artists and simply don't care or else don't believe that they are really stealing, perhaps because they are still buying music. (And, arguably, the disapproval of aging rockers like John and McCartney may not be the most compelling deterrent to pirating hipster teens.)

But even if Napster lovers do feel a bit of remorse for the starving artists who aren't getting their royalties, it's rather improbable that they'll be shedding guilty tears for poor McCartney and John. BusinessAge magazine recently named McCartney the richest rock star in Britain, with a $706.9 million fortune; John held a firm second place, with $220.8 million. With that wealth, perhaps the two rockers could start a fund to reimburse more legitimately Napster-impoverished artists? -- Janelle Brown [1:45 p.m. PST, Nov. 27, 2000]

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Backflip reinvents itself

Take Backflip. In March, the start-up company -- which lets people move their bookmarks from their browser to the Web -- moved into the same building as Salon.com, saturating a pair of floors in purple and yellow. Thick carpets bore both colors (resembling fruit-stripe gum), while fluffy chairs caught the purple and yellow virus too. Indeed, only one thing -- a yellow block-lettered Backflip sign -- convinced those who saw the company through open elevator doors that they hadn't mistakenly stumbled into the L.A. Lakers locker room. But alas, now that sign is gone. It's been replaced by a red, gray and white moniker that bears the name Intanda.com. According to someone renting space on one of the same floors, Intanda is a new company that was started by the Backflip boys when their original plan started to look, well, less than profitable.

The companies, which share a phone line, did not answer repeated calls about the matter, but assuming that Backflip has begun shifting resources toward the new company, it's tough to blame them. They're certainly not the first ones to shift corporate gears. Plus. Web-enabled bookmarks are at best mildly beneficial, while Intanda's focus on cellphone messaging seems more promising.

Still, it must be hard for the ex-Backflip employees to walk into the office every day. The purple and yellow carpets still greet them, but now -- like so many dot-commers -- they'll be greeted by a new sign and thus a visible symbol that they, like their company, are expendable. -- Damien Cave [9:45 a.m. PST, Nov. 27, 2000]

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Eisner: Beware the BCC!

Michael Eisner quoted by the Economist on the danger of "blind carbon copy" e-mail within companies:

"I have come to believe that if anything will bring about the downfall of a company or maybe a country, it is blind copies of e-mails that should have never been sent." [2:03 p.m. PST, Nov. 22, 2000]

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This Ping isn't coming back

According to a report on the NANOG mailing list, Mike Muuss, author of an indispensable software program called Ping, died Monday night in a car crash.

Beloved to network administrators around the world, Ping was originally a utility that worked with the legendary BSD version of Unix created at Berkeley, but is now an essential part of almost every operating system. Functionally, it is the simplest of tools -- it sends a single packet of information to an Internet address to see if that address is reachable. As a debugger of Internet connections, Ping was/is invaluable.

Ping's usefulness was so important that the term quickly became a part of geek jargon. To "ping" a person meant to contact that person via any means. "Ping me again if you don't hear from me about your question tomorrow," one hacker might say to another.

The Unix community is mourning its loss, and not just because by all accounts Mike Muuss was a real nice guy and the software he donated to the public was incredibly useful. The network that Muuss and thousands of other programmers created is now an essential cornerstore of the world economy and culture. We are all linked together via that network -- we can all "ping" each other, so to speak. Ping itself was simple (a mere 1,000 lines of code), but the concept that it underscored -- the interconnectedness of all things -- is as profound as one could imagine. -- Andrew Leonard [10:45 a.m. PST, Nov. 22, 2000]

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