On Message with Ben Gross

It is human nature to dislike paperwork. I recently had the displeasure of having to deal with a quantity amount of paperwork that included a mixture of PDF, Microsoft Word, and printed documents. Virtually, none of the PDF or Word files were created as fill out forms, and unfortunately most of the PDF files were [...]

E-mail typosquatting poses leakage threat: an interesting additional problem presented by Oliver Friedrichs at the Black Hat conference. Individuals have registered common misspellings of known domains and then created email addresses on those domains that match the legitimate domains in order to receive potentially confidential email.
Mozilla Messaging: David Ascher describes the recently launched Mozilla Messaging, [...]

10 Email Addresses That Will Be Useful When You Have No Internet Access: Digital Inspiration provides a list of services accessible via email that are useful for the occasional time where you might have email access (say on your mobile device), but not general internet access. These include services for file conversion, blogging, presentation, sharing [...]

Recently, I found myself needing broadband connectivity in places where I could not find a wired or WiFi connection for my laptop. I have become used to having ubiquitous data on my phone. I do not have the option to tether my computer to my phone to the computer and even if I did I [...]

Diagnosis: Email Apnea?: Researcher Linda Stone discusses her research into the unfortunately too common practice of people holding their breath while checking their email on computers and blackberries. She talks about her early findings, the possible health consequences, and techniques to improve our breathing.
Piling vs. Filing - Emailers Anonymous: Jason Clarke at Download Squad makes [...]

Email Newsletters: New Results From Eyetracking and User Research: Jakob Nielsen, from the well known usability firm Nielsen Norman Group, writes about user research his firm conducted on email newsletters. The summary of the work is presented in this column and a full report is available for purchase.
Visualizing Social Media Fatigue ReadWriteWeb describes Andrew Shuttleworth’s [...]

Email Standards Project Acid Test | Email Standards Project: this is a test inspired by the Web Standards Project (WaSP) Acid tests that are widely used to gauge standards compliance for browsers. The Email Standards Project Acid Test aims to do the same for HTML standards rendering in email clients. Current results are available for [...]

Microsoft plus Yahoo! Strategic Assets in Email: Tim O’Reilly writes about the implications of a combined Microsoft/Yahoo email market and reiterates that he thinks building a new generation of address books that integrate social networking could be a major competitive advantage.
Google Code Blog: URLs are People, Too: Google announced their Social Graph API which combines [...]

Texting4Health is a day-long selection of presentations and panels on how mobile text messaging (SMS) can be used to improve personal and public health. The event is hosted By Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). I attended the earlier Mobile Persuasion conference also hosted [...]