Bad News in Your Inbox

I have been asked so many times "Is it possible to tell if someone has read my email?" And the answer, of course, is no: email gets sent; whether it is received or read is entirely unknown.

Unless you use DidTheyReadIt. I presume this works by adding an invisible HTML element to the email message that calls back to the company so they can track when messages are read. Although this might satisfy people who insist on knowing whether their masterpieces have been read, it's really Bad News because of the tracking it carries out. And just think of the field-day spammers will have: now, they won't have to guess whether an address works or not.

I hope that email clients will add the facility to block this kind of stupidity. It's not what email is about: if the person who receives your email can't be bothered to reply, either your message wasn't important enough - or maybe they aren't. (Via Lessig .)

Sorry, Larry...

...but I can't agree on this one. You write:

Check out webcitation.org -- a project run at the University of Toronto. The basic idea is to create a permanent URL for citations, so that when the Supreme Court, e.g., cites a webpage, there's a reliable way to get back to the webpage it cited. They do this by creating a reference URL, which then will refer back to an archive of the page created when the reference was created. E.g., I entered the URL for my blog ("http://lessig.org/blog"). It then created an archive URL "http://www.webcitation.org/5IlFymF33". Click on it and it should take you to an archive page for my blog.

This is the TinyURL problem all over again. It destroys one of the greatest features of the Web: its transparency. You can generally see where you are going and some of the structure of what you will find there. TinyURLs and Larry's recommendation do away with this.

Another point is that it's actually harder to enter gobbledygook like "http://www.webcitation.org/5IlFymF33" than even long, but comprehensible URLs, so this system doesn't even achieve the goal of making addresses easier to enter.

Agreed, we need an archive of the Web: but we already have one in the wonderful Internet Archive. What we really need to do is to support it better, with more dosh and more infrastructure.