Dec 05
A friend recently asked me “are you a blogger?”
I love and hate the term “blog.” It’s so trendy now.
The reality is that the PowerPage pre-dates the term “blog” by quite a while. I started the PowerPage in 1995, before Dave’s Scripting News (1997) and Slashdot (1997) and even before the Way Back Machine at Archive.org (1996).
I don’t write about what I ate for breakfast, what CD I’m listening too, or about my sister’s favorite boy band.
The PowerPage is a serial publication, that publishes daily and it’s independent. Which are blog-esque qualities. But, in addition to the PowerPage, I’ve been a paid contributor to MacWeek, MacWorld, MacAddict, MacPower and the MacBible over the years.
So while being a “blogger” doesn’t automatically make you a professional journalist, being a paid journalist for print and online pubs for over 10 years definitely does.
Case closed.
Dec 05
I recently got a chuckle out of this “Privacy Policy” from MaxEmail. You gotta love the way they start out with “Your privacy is very important to us. However…” Let this be a lesson for you. ANY time you sign up for anything, read the terms very carefully, there are tons of little gems like this out there.
Your privacy is very important to us. However, we collect and, in some cases, disclose information about you as part of the normal operation of our site. This Privacy Policy describes the information we collect about you and what may happen to that information. As described below, some of your personally identifiable information is disclosed to third parties and used by us and third parties. By accepting the MaxEmail.com Terms of Service, you expressly consent to such use and disclosure of your personally identifiable and other personal information.
Information About You
We ask you to provide information when you register for the MaxEmail.com services. This information includes your name, email address, mailing/billing address and telephone number.
It is MaxEmail.com’s policy to respect the privacy of its members. Although we do not sell or rent any personally identifiable information about you to any third party, we may, in certain cases where you access our site from other third party sites, release your email address to such third party. We do not disclose certain pieces of information, such as your MaxEmail number, username, password, or PIN at all. We may aggregate personally identifiable information and disclose such information to third parties in aggregate for a number of business purposes, including running and enhancing the services, but in these situations we do not disclose to other entities any information that could be used to personally identify you. Also, we may use information about you to provide you with ads or offers from advertisers that we think may be relevant to you, but in these cases we do not disclose any personally identifiable information about you to third parties. On our site and via email, we may offer you the option to choose to receive electronic information about topic(s) of interest to you from other companies. If you choose to receive information from such companies, MaxEmail.com may provide to such companies your name, email address and other pertinent information if applicable and the company may contact you directly. These programs are offered as “opt-in” programs, not as “opt-out” programs, meaning you will be contacted only if you choose to participate. We will not pass your name or email address to other companies without your permission, except as otherwise specified in this Privacy Policy Statement. In the course of using our site and our services, we automatically track certain information about you. This information may include the number and source of fax transmissions, the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on our site or not), which URL you next go to (whether this URL is on our site or not), what browser you are using, and your IP address. We use this information in the normal operation of the site and we may disclose this information on an aggregated basis.