MailChimp is a newletter service that allows it’s users to send emails to anyone who subscribes to them.  They have a service that allows anyone to get up to 2000 people on a mailing list and not have to pay a cent.

Unfortunately there is a drawback to this service.

With the launch of my podcasting network, Say It Productions, I was going to sign up for the service, but for anyone out there who is doing podcasting out of their home might not want to use this service.

The reason is because MailChimp has to follow The CAN-SPAM Act.  With all legitimate online mailings there are a few things that must be posted in the email.  One of these things is to list where your business is located.  If you’re doing a podcast out of your home, you have to give you home address.  (There is no way around this, because if any false information is provided your mailing list, and possibly account, can be pulled.)

So, how can you get around this?

Besides providing false information the only legitimate way would be to go to your local post office and rent a PO Box.  It might not be cost worthy to do this, but if you really want to send out regular mailings this would be the way you can do it.

But there is another way to do it.

Your website is the safest place to do this.  The reason I say it’s safe is because this is the place where you own your own stuff.  If you put stuff on Twitter, Facebook, or any other site that isn’t yours there is no guarantee that you will always have access to it.  By using Feedburner you can create an email subscription feed that will send an email of any new postings to the user.  This is the closest you can get to a mailing list without supplying your home address.

Feedburner allows you to post a small piece of HTML on your site so people can sign up and be emailed the new posting from the website.  For more information on this check out the FAQ.

So, if you want to send mailings to your users but now want to give out your home address these two options are the best way to go.

I don’t know if the website has one like this at all, but I figured I would throw this one together just for the heck of it.

I call it the “House Arrest” badge, and you can see why it’s called that:

Sorry, my mind is wandering, but only took me a few minutes to throw this together.  Here’s the badge without the description if you want to have it.

Hope you all have a great day.

If you haven’t heard already 80′s film director John Hughes passed away today.  Being a child of that grew up in the ’80′s I related to all of his films back them.  I always wanted to be Ferris Bueller or John Bender or even Kevin McCallister and to live in Shermer, Illinois.

This isn’t the point of this posting.  I can go on for hours talking about his films in detail.

I kill people. 

Okay, maybe that’s a little over the top, but my timing always seems to be impeccible.

Last weekend I was flicking through the channels and came across the Steve Martin/John Candy movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  Of course, my laptop was near me when watching TV so I figured I’d go to Wikipedia and look up a little bit about John Hughes to see what he’s up to nowadays.

Fast forward to today – John Hughes dies of a heart attack, aged 59.

Okay, so I looked up a celebrity online and they die very soon after.  But, I have done this several times.  I know that I’ve looked up several other people on Wikipedia before to see if they were alive and still working and, not long after, they pass on.

The one other instance that I can think of is the actress Yvonne De Carlo.  A few years ago I was watching TV (as always) and stumbled across “The Munsters” show and was wondering if Lily Munster (aka Yvonne) was still alive.  (I knew the kids were alive and the other adults passed on, but was curious about her.)  So, I meandered over to Wikipedia and was suprised the she was still kicking at age 84!

Two days later she was dead.

I know these are two instances that are 2 1/2 years apart from each other, but I have looked up a couple of other celebrities, who weren’t in the limelight, on Wikipedia just before their death.  I wish I could think of their names now, but I know that this has happened before to me.

So, if you are famous and have a Wikipedia entry online, pray that I don’t look you up one day to see what you’re up to.

I call people like this ‘forwarding freaks.’

These are the people that anytime they get a joke, riddle, quiz, pictures, link, or whatever before they even read it they hit that FORWARD button on their email program and send it to everyone imaginable.

I don’t mind getting forwards from people, but at least make them worth my while to open them up.  I don’t want to open up a 3 minute video clip to see something that was emailed to everyone back in 1997!

The typical forward from my mother consists of the subject line have “FWD:” in it at least a dozen times before you actually can read the subject line.  Then when you get to the message you have to scroll down a good three seconds through all the previous email addresses that this message was sent to.  Then, if your unlucky, you have a long message that you have to read that you hope is funny.  Usually, when I read it I wonder to myself why I wasted 2 minutes of my life on that.

I’ve had several forwarding freaks as friends, and the best way to combat them is to ignore them.  Don’t send them any emails, don’t reply to what they send, DON’T DO ANYTHING!  After awhile, they’ll think that you don’t use that email account.  The problem with family is that no matter how much you ignore their emails, they’ll keep sending them.

So everytime I get a lot of emails in my inbox I know that my mother has been active on the Internet.  Hello delete key!

Pownce never really got it’s feet off of the ground the moment it came online more than a year ago.

I jumped on board to this website when it was still in it’s early beta phase.  I was never really impressed with what it had to offer.  To me, it appeared to be “just another social website” with nothing special to offer.

The reason I think that Pownce never made it off the ground was due to the lack of advertising.  One of it’s founders, Kevin Rose, has a huge Internet presence.  He is one of the founders of the podcasting “network” Revision3, founded Digg.com, and was the host to it’s accompanied podcast, Diggnation. The problem is that Kevin never really pushed Pownce whenever the opportunity came up.  There was on specific instance at a live taping of Diggnation when Kevin asked people who use MySpace, Facebook, and a few other social websites.  He never mentioned Pownce at all.  In fact, one of the audience members yelled Pownce out from the crowd.

Another reason that Pownce never really made it big was because of the members.  Most of the people who joined the website were followers of Kevin, in one way or another.  They were the ones who tried to get others to join.  In fact, when I mentioned Pownce to people they looked at me like I was crazy or something.

The third reason was that Pownce had too many bugs with it.  When the site was in it’s beta form it ran smoothly.  I had very minimal issues with the site that were easily cleared up with a quick hit of the refresh button on the browser.  The day that the site went public, it got bogged down.  There were many instances when the site wouldn’t load at all, or would just sit there when trying to upload a post.  Because of those issues I very rarely go back to the website at all.  I still have issues trying to log in most of the times.

I am still sad that Pownce is going away, but I am still surprised that it lasted this long as it did.  It feels like it’s a failed startup that was just ignored by it’s founders who were hoping that it would die on it’s own.

Go back to when you were in elementary school (people my age or older will understand this more.  When you used to sit in those chairs that were bolted to the desks and the comfort level was almost as bad as sitting on broken glass.  The teacher would yell at anyone that would even talk.  So, what did you do?  that’s right, you would right a note.

Pulling out a piece of lined paper from your spiral binder (the edges all frayed) you would start at the top and write something and fold it up and have it passed off to someone.  Within a few minutes the note would come back to you folded up the same way.  When you opened it up there would be a response underneath yours, sometimes in a different color, but definitely in a different writing style.  Enter the instant messenger of yesteryear.

Of course, you wouldn’t get all the ‘bells and whistles’ as you would with the IM programs of today, but it did serve it’s purpose.