General

I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but the blogging I do as part of my contract work for The Houston Chonicle over at the Helpline Blog is pretty cool to me.

My great grandfather, Franklin W. Lee, owned the Rush City News of Rush City, Minnesota and my great grandmother took it over after his death. Marilla Upright was the first woman newspaper editor of the country, and made the speech opening the Minn. pavilion at the 1892-3 Worlds Fair in Chicago.

I actually have my great grandfather’s journal that he wrote. It documents the birth of my grandfather and even has his first drawing in it. Kinda like his “blog” so-to-speak.

Anyway, I like what I do at the Chronicle and I like getting to be a part of the online aspects of what is happening there.

Today I got the news that the Chronicle has been recognized for it’s efforts in blogging.

New York University Associate Professor Jay Rosen from Pressthink and his students conducted a study to determine which major U.S. newspapers were best at blogging.

Fifteen undergraduates in journalism, two grad students, and one professor set out to determine–by our lights– the top blogging newspapers in the U.S. among major dailies. We found six standouts, two honorable mentions and some wacky blogs. Number One in our eyes: the Houston Chronicle. By a mile.

Coming in second is the Washington Post.

You can read about the study here.

I don’t fancy myself a newspaper man but I suppose there is some of it in my blood. Franklin Lee is one of my favorite relatives. He was a journalist, poet, playwright, essayist and editor.

I’d like to think that he might be proud of my efforts, or at least see them as something worthwhile. At any rate, it’s good to be acknowledged by one’s peers. And that’s what happened today.

Congrats to Evil Dwight over at chron.com and to all the Houston Chronicle Bloggers!
We’re #1!!!

The company I work for has between 600 and 800 people working globally. We generate a LOT of e-mail, as you might imagine. Here recently I have been getting a rash of calls about e-mail from here to AOL being delayed.

I remember reading this article about AOL’s plan to implement a fee for bulk e-mail messages.

Basically, if you want to send a certain amount of e-mail to AOL users and you don’t pay your e-mail priority is lowered.

I had one user here who indicated that they sent an e-mail to their spouse’s AOL address and it took two days to get delivered.

While I was discussing this one of our engineers forwarded me the following:

Some interesting news that I thought that I would share with you, and this may be old news to you but it was new news to me.

Late last week one of our employees started receiving Marshal “˜your email has been delayed’ messages on some (but not all) email that he was sending to his wife @aol.com. Since I had implemented the new HOU MTA servers, we were thinking that there was some correlation of his issue and it being related to the implementation of the new servers.

The MM folks tell me that yahoo.com is going to be implementing the same thing soon too. There are several other domains that also have adopted this philosophy, but I do not have their email domains.

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Interestingly enough, we are not listed on any of the RBLs (Real-Time Blacklists) so I don’t know what criteria AOL used to determine we were a “spamming” company.

And to think, I defended AOL not too long ago.