IT Spot

The first e-mail program I ever used was MCI Mail. When the IT administrator swung by one day, he told me “this was the future.” Maybe he had Blade Runner in mind.

Within a few weeks, my inbox was already swamped and I had no idea how best to proceed. I subsequently graduated to Lotus Notes and then later, a kludgy product from Microsoft whose name I thankfully can’t recall. These days I’m on MS Outlook, where I’ve become master of the mass block-delete.

Amazing that about two decades after e-mail became a must-have tool in the workplace that we’re still struggling how to avoid getting swamped by the daily crush of e-mail. I was reminded of this mess after Mike Arrington posted a late day question over at TechCrunch bemoaning his struggle to master the flow of e-mail correspondence accumulating in his inbox.

“I routinely declare email bankruptcy and simply delete my entire inbox. But even so, I currently have 2,433 unread emails in my inbox. Plus another 721 in my Facebook inbox. and about thirty skype message windows open with unanswered messages. It goes without saying, of course, that my cell phone voicemail box is also full (I like the fact that new messages can’t be left there, so I have little incentive to clear it out).”

How do I deal with email now? I scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages. People I know who don’t waste my time, or who I have a genuine friendship with. Or descriptive subject lines that help me understand that I should allot a minute or more of my life to opening it and reading it.”

This is old stuff for anyone with a Internet connection. Unfortunately, the problem gets worse all the time and we deal with it the best way we can–usually in a ad-hoc, half-assed fashion. So it is that Arrington concludes his post with a what-if rumination.

“The long term answer to all of this isn’t that people need to try harder to respond to communication requests. The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages. If I knew what that solution was, I’d quit this blog and go do it. Someone out there, though, has the beginning of an idea on how we can better manage our electronic communications. And he or she may someday turn that into a product and save us.

If you are the person with the idea to save us all, send me an email and tell me all about it. Actually, strike that. Drop by my house and tell me all about it. I don’t want your message to get lost in my inbox.”

Actually, developers rolled up their sleeves to take a crack at the challenge a while ago. For whatever reason, though, the big e-mail providers offer little more than lip service.

Xobni (inbox backward, get it?) is an e-mail organizer (If memory serves, these guys actually were selected as part of the TechCrunch 40), but they don’t do prioritization. Instead, the program displays more information about the messages as you click on them.

One company that I’m familiar with is called ClearContext, which has been toiling in semi-anonymity here in San Francisco for the last five years. (Full disclosure: I know the principles and have tossed back a few suds on a occasions. So what? But I thought you should know.)

Anyway, they’ve already developed an add-in product to try to eliminate the e-mail overload crush by assigning priorities and topic categorization. The reviews so far have been good, but this remains a small start-up–three guys and a guitar–still waiting for that proverbial big break to come along.

The rub is that the majority of the corporate world still depends on the likes of Microsoft and IBM for their e-mail systems. If the big players want to resolve the problem, they can either buy some of these smaller startups for their technologies or tap the Brainiacs in the labs to come up with a fix. It shouldn’t be all that hard, can it? Or maybe I’m missing the point.

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media is twisted.

Twisted in a brilliant, kiss my tuchas kind of way.

Here I am this morning, sitting in front of the computer with my earphones on, laughing my ass off. My wife walks over and she sees me cutting up over a rooster bouncing around on screen. Of course, she’s not hearing Feldman’s sarcastic voice-over in a hilarious lampooning of a Shel Israel video interview on Fast Company.

Feldman, who heads a Web video production company in New York, probably upsets a lot of people with his posts, but I think he’s one of the freshest voices in digital media. It’s a lot of inside baseball about the tech business but newbies to his shtick should leave any tender sensibilities at the door. This dude is raw…big time. (Check out Feldman’s “People who should be Jewish” video riff. Steve Jobs will hate it, but it’s inspired.)

It may not be Wolf Blitzer, but it’s one hundred times more entertaining. The best thing about Feldman? He’s got the cojones to upset the prissy assumptions of the TechMeme A-listers. Every now and then he leaves a verbal fart in the room and leers into the camera for effect.

Seriously.

Here comes my Sunday morning rant. This industry has always been a lot of fun to write about. But when it comes to conversations over future directions in technology, these days good humor is in short supply. I’m sure money has something to do with it. A lot of people who have big bets obviously have a vested interest in how things are going to turn out. But there’s also a lot of passion even if you don’t have any personal skin in the game. So it is that Twitter may be the most revolutionary advance in digital communications or the biggest waste of time since the hula hoop. FriendFeed may mark a major breakthrough in “conversational platforms” or “more hyped yawn.”

I’m not smart enough to predict how this is going to turn out. Still, it’s quite amazing to watch the opinion-making mandarins freak out on cue when someone has the temerity to put forward a counter-argument to the conventional wisdom. (As I write, they’re burning Nick Carr at the stake for his take on Billy Bragg’s Saturday op-ed piece in The New York Times.

Wonder how they’d react to Feldman growling about how big business is being “duped by this user-generated crap and how Andrew Keen was right about everything.” That’s not a popular point of view. Then again, he doesn’t a damn what they think. And that’s why he’s got me hooked.

Just how much does Ask.com own the word “Ask?” Enough to have a problem with a question-and-answer site called “Askpedia,” apparently. Representatives from the start-up Askpedia.com told CNET News.com that the search engine’s parent company, InterActiveCorp, sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this month, citing intellectual property violations in the name “Askpedia.”

“(This) is likely to cause consumer confusion, particularly inasmuch as Askpedia purports to provide online informational services that are substantially similar to those provided by Ask,” the letter dated March 13 reads. “In using and incorporating Ask’s intellectual property in this manner, Askpedia is falsely suggesting a connection between Ask and Askpedia, and thereby misappropriating the substantial good will associated with Ask’s trademarks.”

IAC representatives were contacted to verify the contents of the cease-and-desist letter, but were not immediately available for comment.

Ask.com’s trademark on the name was first filed April 28, 1999, when the company was still known as Ask Jeeves and had not yet been acquired by the Barry Diller-helmed IAC in 2005. These days, the search engine has been undergoing a restructuring process in order to handle its tepid market share.

The letter, signed by Edward T. Ferguson, IAC senior vice president and general counsel, and provided to CNET News.com by Askpedia representatives, goes on to request that Askpedia “cease and desist from all use of Ask’s trademarks and other intellectual property, including without limitation in the name ‘Askpedia’ or any similar formation using the word ‘ask,’” and agree not to do so in the future.

A deadline of 10 days was provided, meaning that IAC would presumably seek legal action after Sunday, March 23.

Yong Su Kim, CEO of Askpedia, which describes itself as “a knowledge marketplace for questions and answers” and awards cash prizes to the best answers, said that his small start-up has about 100,000 registered users. He sent an e-mail to CNET News.com in which he speculated that “our guess is that their lawyers have nothing better to do.”

Kim continued, “Either that or they’re working on a Wikipedia-like service and want the domain name and trademark.”