Lost in Translation

It occurred to me today that I’d never satisfactorily answered this question to anybody, even though I’ve been asked many times. Unfortunately, that’s because it’s a two-part answer and requires a logical leap.

The first part is Ether.

To understand this you need to go back a little over a hundred years. Physicists of the 19th century were struggling to understand how light got from the sun to the Earth, and why it behaved the way it did; the belief that light was a particle explained many of its behaviors (like reflection) but not others (like refraction). To explain this, scientists proposed a medium through which light traveled, the luminiferous aether. Invisible and omnipresent, it allowed light to travel through what was otherwise assumed to be a vacuum, and faster-than-light propagation of waves caused by the light explained the odd non-particle behaviors.

Naturally, Einstein showed up in the early 20th century and screwed the whole thing up with Special Relativity, but that’s neither here nor there.

In the mid-70s, engineers at Xerox developed a computer-networking protocol that was superior both in speed and in usability to the then-prevalent but highly-proprietary Token Ring and Token Bus systems. Unlike the Token systems, each system on Xerox’s network could see each other system, regardless of whether the systems were linked serially (that is, each computer hooked to the next in sequence, like elephants in a row, trunk-to-tail), hubwise (a central core into which each computer hooked, like an octopus), or otherwise. The new networking protocol, in effect, allowed the computers to pretend that there was an invisible, pervasive medium surrounding them, through which they could propagate messages to other systems, much like the sun propagated light to the planets.

In a fit of pique, the Xerox engineers (who were now working with Digital and Intel to finalize the standard) named their protocol after the luminiferous aether, and thus Ethernet – the networking protocol by which the vast majority of local internet nodes communicate – was born.

The second part is jammer, and although it’s a lot simpler to explain, I’ll wager that fewer of the people who read this will have run across the origin of this part before.

To understand this part, we need to go back to the late Age of Sail, just before the advent of steamships. There were two major classes of shipping vessels then: the clippers, which held a smaller cargo and were less maneuverable but were much faster, and the windjammers, which were larger and slower, but carried more cargo, were more maneuverable, and – speed aside – were generally more capable ships than the clippers. (Both of these, sadly, were displaced by steamships, which – unlike clippers and windjammers, which were both sailing ships – were not reliant on the wind to get from point A to point B.)

Combining the two gives us Etherjammer: a large, flexible, maneuverable ship that plies the open Ethernet; not the fastest ship in the fleet, but adaptable and able to deal with a wide array of tasks.

(Yes, it’s a metaphor.)

I didn’t mean my last post to impugn Pam or Charlie. I think they’re great people and I went to great lengths to make sure my readers (all two of them) knew that. Like I said in the last post, I believe very strongly that Pam and Charlie are trustworthy and respectable people who won’t abuse the list of addresses they’ve collected. It’s just that their sign-up form was what brought the topic to hand. I apologize if I led anyone to believe that Pam and Charlie are less than trustworthy or that I have less than complete respect for them.

1. Today I signed up for Pam Slim and Charlie Gilkey’s free teleclass, “Thinking Big, Acting Small”. It’s a promo for their Lift-Off Retreat for small business owners, and since I know (at least, know of) and respect both Pam and Charlie, I signed up.

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2. Lots of people, including Holly, use a company called AWeber to manage their email mailing lists. It’s fast, full-featured, and reliable, and I see no reason not to use it, assuming that you can afford the monthly fee. (Right at the moment they’re running a promotion that gives you the first month for $1, cancel anytime – and I’m not getting anything for telling you that, by the way.) It automates most of the work for you. All you have to do is set up the list with their system and then send out emails, and they deal with the rest. They’ll even give you a form that you can put on your website; when people fill the form out, they get added to your mailing list. Easy, no work, as my friend Mickey is wont to say.

AWeber also does a good job of keeping track of who’s signed up for your mailing lists and when they signed up – and you can make as many lists as you want, and put the subscribers from one list into another list, such that you can have superlists and sublists and huge varieties of functionality regarding how readers get their information from you.

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3. Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this.

Since AWeber does a good job of handling subscriber lists, it makes a certain degree of sense to use their services in other areas where you want to keep track of who’s signed up for something you’re offering. In this case, Pam and Charlie decided that an AWeber list would be a good way to keep track of the people who have signed up for their free class. When you fill out the sign-up form on their website, you’re taken through to AWeber, which puts you on the compassion09 subscription list and sends you a confirmation email, and then, once you’ve confirmed, another email with details for the class.

This is all well and good.

Except that nowhere on their page about the class, or in either the confirmation email or the details email, do Pam and Charlie tell you that what you’re really doing is signing up for a mailing list. It’s all about signing up for the teleclass. To most people, that means “give me the details, let me attend, then disappear”. If Pam and Charlie start sending follow-up emails, they’re going to come as a surprise. The only reason I knew about it was because I have experience with AWeber and because I’ve been burned by signing up for teleclasses when they were just an excuse to get me on an email marketing list.

I did a quick poll on Twitter: “Show of hands: if someone gives you their email address, is it cool to sign them up for an email list w/o saying that’s what you’re doing?” The universal response was “absolutely not”. I tend to agree. It’s neither honest nor ethical to place someone on a mailing list without their knowledge or consent. That’s what spammers do.

I don’t know what Pam and Charlie are going to do with the email addresses they’ve collected. I really want it to be true that their intent really, truly is to just use them to send out information about the call and then destroy the list when they’re finished, because I trust them. But I’ve been burned before by people I thought I trusted, and since they’re using a mailing list to collect the information, and given that AWeber had a security leak a few weeks ago, it really behooves them – and anyone else using a mailing list as a back-end for teleclass/ebook/etc. sign-up – to put a disclaimer on their page: “By filling this out, you’re signing up for a mailing list. Don’t worry, it’s just how we’re keeping track of who’s signed up for the class. As soon as the class is over, the mailing list goes away.” If you think people aren’t going to sign up if they see it’s a mailing list, find another way to do the sign-ups. Honesty is the only way here, guys, and omission is just as big a lie as commission in this case.

Pam Slim, the author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, has a new article up on Open Forum: How to Choose a Business to Start. It’s well-written and speaks to my condition. I highly recommend it!