I was reading in the Webpronews newsletter more about AOL and Yahoo getting ready to use Goodmail. What can I say except they’re annoying quite a range of people. You know a company is doing something unpopular when political groups as different as RightMarch and MoveOn are both opposed to the idea.

Of course, this kind of idea will never be popular with businesses and that’s quite reasonable. And it’s also quite reasonable for individuals to be opposed. It’s none of AOL’s or Yahoo’s business to decide who you, as an individual, want to allow to email you. That’s why whitelisting is reasonable - it allows the individual to say that such and such a business is allowed to contact them.

Now, I’ll admit AOL users are sometimes a problem for businesses in any case. All too many of them are a little free about using the “Spam” button to unsubscribe from newsletters they have merely become bored with, but had chosen to subscribe to previously. Not all of them do that, but anyone who runs a newsletter knows it happens. But Goodmail is certainly not the solution.

I really hope that AOL and Yahoo find that the backlash on this is not worth the extra income, or this could easily become a new business trend. I understand businesses looking for new income sources, but they need to limit themselves to that which is theirs to control.

Clickbank has finally posted a beta search of its products. It’s nothing special as search goes, but at least they’ve finally put in a tiny bit of effort in that area.

This is at least a break from the old way of searching Clickbank, which was to either use a third party script or use the site:clickbank.com plus a keyword command on Google. Those worked, certainly, but it’s nice to have something done by Clickbank.

Will this be enough of an improvement to head off interest in competitors such as PayDotCom? Only time will tell. I personally have no preference for either - I take a look and see who has something I’d like to offer on my site. I don’t sell any products yet, so I haven’t had to choose between them in that area yet.

If you are interested in offering information products, I strongly recommend joining both programs, then picking by which products will do the best for your needs. Clickbank is certainly better known, but a lot of people feel there are too many junk products on there. PayDotCom is newer, but seems to be doing well so far.

I just read an interesting, albeit very brief, report on Pew Internet. It says that nearly a third of Internet users go online daily just for fun.

This is one of those things that get me thinking about possible business angles. People want to have fun online. There has to be a way to get some of that traffic and benefit from it.

There are all kinds of ways to do this, of course. Unique online games, online humor, chatting… lots of other ways, but I’m not going to make the whole list. The trick is making money from it. People will pay to have fun, but you have to make it worth their while.

Most of my sites are pretty practical, so this would be a switch from my usual. I’m going to have to give this some thought.

There are just some days that are harder than others to get work done. Today the problem isn’t so much with motivation as it is deciding what project exactly to work on. I have so many things I would like to get done that sometimes it’s hard to decide where to start, which leads to frustration.

I’m trying to get a bunch of directories set up in my program that makes submissions so much simpler, because that will allow me eventually to take maybe an hour or two and submit one site to all the directories, which would be great for link building. But getting them in is tedious, and since the baby’s asleep, I’d rather be doing things that are harder to get done with him on my lap, his current favorite place if he’s awake.

I’m also suffering from one of the other chronic problems of running a home business - the call of housework. There’s lots to be done there too.

I have one site I would like to get up and running this week, and one site idea per week for the next several weeks just sitting there. Since I get stubborn about outsourcing content development or using an excessive amount of free articles, I can’t just slap a site up like some people do. I like doing the research to provide quality information all on my own. It isn’t easy, but to me it is fun!

I saw a bit about this on the news last night as well as getting an email from Marketing Sherpa (a great resource!) referring to it.

Apparently, AOL and Yahoo are thinking about charging for guaranteed delivery of email. Email that pays for delivery would bypass spam filters and no need to be whitelisted.

Details on this are not very clear yet, but if this becomes popular it could really add to the costs of email marketing. They’re talking $2.50-10 per 1000 emails.

I agree with the folks at Marketing Sherpa - RSS looks better all the time! It sounds like the charge at this point is only to guarantee delivery and that you could still take your chances without paying, but I wouldn’t bet on that lasting. Once businesses see a way to earn more money they’re likely to want to continue. I don’t know exactly how it would work, since I don’t think regular consumers would accept being charged to email their friends, but you never know.

This is one of those trends to keep an eye on!