AOL and Yahoo announced they will start charging companies a fee to ensure commerical email is delivered (without being subject to Spam Filtering, etc). Most personal email will still be delivered without a fee imposed. I started to think about Metrics....
First, i estimate about 1 in every 500 emails sent to me does not reach my AOL address - it's happened several times over the last 18 months (that's the first time I noticed). AOL's SPAM filters are getting better as 99% of the time, what's in my SPAM folder is SPAM.
"AOL and its parent, Time Warner, which also owns a large cable system offering high-speed Internet access, have not taken a public stand on the principle of Net neutrality. Neither has Yahoo, which has close relationships with AT& T and Verizon".
It's disturbing to me much of the internet backbone is controlled by a couple of players such as AOL - Time Warner - Yahoo. What happens if we have to pay something to ensure the delivery of it? Seth Godin has come up with a interesting email metric . Seth said "...right metric isn't how much it costs to send a mail. It's how much sending a mail is worth!"
Seth goes on to suggest the metric used to measure traffic is wrong -
"The same metric mistake comes up when we see sites that do whatever they can to artificially boost traffic. Saw a blog post today in which the author mentioned the name of ten or fifteen bloggers, ostensibly in context, with links to each, all in an attempt to game the system. But what's his real goal? When increasing the metric doesn't increase the benefit, then you have the wrong metric."
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