MAKING A PROFIT FROM E-MAIL : MESSAGES COULD SOON INCLUDE ADS.Byline: Reid Kanaley The Philadelphia Inquirer Philadelphia Inquirer Morning newspaper, long one of the most influential dailies in the eastern U.S. Founded in 1847 as the Pennsylvania Inquirer, it took its present name c. 1860. It was a strong supporter of the Union in the American Civil War. Don't like junk e-mail See spam. ? How about if it comes from your mom She goes to the gym. ? The head of an electronic sales company said Friday that he has devised a way to let anyone put colorful animated advertisements on the e-mail they send - and to make money doing it. How? The e-mail recipient could purchase the advertised product with one mouse click on the ad; every time that happened, the sender would get a commission from the advertiser. How's that for a reason to write home? With that kind of inducement Inducement Electra incited brother, Orestes, to kill their mother and her lover. [Gk. Myth.: Zimmerman, 92; Gk. Lit.: Electra, Orestes] Hezekiah exhorts Judah to stand fast against Assyrians. [O.T. , even e-mail from co-workers, friends and relatives might start showing up with talking banner ads A graphic image used on Web sites to advertise a product or service. Banner ads come in numerous sizes, but are often rectangles 460 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. Also 460 x 55 and 392 x 72 sizes are commonly used. for watches, computer parts, or the sender's favorite music CD. ``E-mail now has the potential of turning everyone into the distributor of a product,'' Lee Stein, president of First Virtual Holdings, told an Internet commerce conference at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania The Wharton School is the business school of University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was established in 1881 through a donation of Joseph Wharton, making it the world’s oldest business school. . ``Everyone in the world could participate.'' The ability to send and receive such e-mail already exists on a limited basis and should be widely available within the next year or so, Stein said. Even in an audience full of Internet capitalists, Stein's proposal raised eyebrows. Commercial junk e-mail, sometimes called ``spam,'' is already a huge problem on the Net, where bulk mailings cost the sender virtually nothing. What if individuals started sending ad-laden e-mail to everyone they know on the chance that it will make them some money? ``You'll be in touch with friends you haven't seen in years,'' Stein observed in an interview after his presentation. ``I was alarmed at the thought,'' said the conference's keynote speaker, Vinton G. Cerf, an Internet pioneer who is now senior vice president for Internet architecture at MCI (1) (Media Control Interface) A high-level programming interface from Microsoft and IBM for controlling multimedia devices. It provides commands and functions to open, play and close the device. (2) (Microwave Communications Inc. . ``How would you defend against that?'' ``It kind of scares me, to be honest,'' said Alan Alper, editor of Computerworld Magazine and another conference participant. ``I get a lot of e-mail and I just don't want to get propositioned to buy things . . . I find that an invasion of privacy invasion of privacy n. the intrusion into the personal life of another, without just cause, which can give the person whose privacy has been invaded a right to bring a lawsuit for damages against the person or entity that intruded. .'' And if it doesn't constitute spam, said Alper, ``it's not too far removed.'' In a question and answer session, Stein insisted to conference attenders that he was not proposing a new way to spam. ``I'm not talking here about mass mailing . . . the spamming stuff is just bad,'' he said. People who don't want to receive such ads could use special software to filter them out, he said. He predicted 1997 would become ``the year of the filter.'' |
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