Posted 10:15 AM by seth godin

The opposite of "remarkable:"

is

very good.

Ideas that are remarkable are much more likely to spread than ideas that aren't. Yet so few people make remarkable stuff. Why? I think it's because they think the opposite of remarkable is bad or mediocre or poorly done. Thus, if they make something very good, they confuse it with being virus-worthy. Yet this is not a discussion about quality at all.

If you travel on an airline and they do everything right, you don't tell anyone. That's what's supposed to happen. What makes it remarkable is if it's horrible beyond belief OR if the service is so unexpected (they were an hour early! they comped my ticket because I was cute! they served flaming crepes suzette in first class!) that you need to share it.

Are you making very good stuff? How fast can you stop?

Posted 10:11 AM by seth godin

The End of Spam?

For years, I've been predicting (fairly optimistically, it turns out) that there was a technology solution to spam, and when it got bad enough, we'd find it. It turns out that we need more than just a passive filtering system, though. We need to change the whole idea of email.

Email in its classic form is a public and open inbox, available to all at no charge. That's busted.

The idea of charging for email is a simple and workable solution, but most players don't have the guts to take the first step.

The new idea, though, is probably going to work. Close the open inbox.

Only let people with permission (don't you love that term? I do.) into the box. If someone wants to write to you and they don't have permission, the program hits them with an autoreply that tells them how to get permission. Spammers, of course, won't be able to get permission and thus they disappear. You never see the program haggling with the stranger, you just see the requests for permission. You save hours a day.

There are plenty of new products coming out that use this method (most of them buggy and still not quite ready) but as they work out some business models, I wouldn't be surprised to see it work. I hope it does!