Despite what many people might think – and have demonstrated – email is still sacred. And spammers who masquerade as real, honest-to-god people, are annoying. Very annoying.

Josh Bernoff on Groundswell picks out three examples of email marketing/PR that fit into this category. All three treated him like a target, not a human. "Influencers and journalists are human, too," he writes. "We get mad at this stuff.
You want us to like your products, so why do you behave like this?" 

(See one he likes – for its ingenuity and personal nature.)

Probably the best advice on how to write an email are the tips from Seth Godin. (They're not designed for email marketers and do in fact include never sending mass emails.)

Some of my faves:

• Don't lie in your subject line, and don't be cute. You're not clever enough to be cute. Just be honest.
• Be short. The purpose of an email is not to sell the person on anything
  other than writing back. If you don't have a personal, interesting way
  to start a conversation, don't write.
• Don't mark your email urgent. Urgent to you is not urgent to me.
• Just because you have someone's email address doesn't mean you have the right to email them.

It was bad enough leaving his pleasant Hyde Park digs and burying his Blackberry, but President Obama had a whole lot more to deal with when he entered his new home this week.

He and his staff entered a White House steeped in history – but not so much with technology, TechCrunch writes.

Upon entering their new offices, staff found that many phone lines had been disconnected and the internal ones that did "work" gave nothing but busy signals. Software on PCs had not been updated in years; Mac-users were forced to use Windows systems; few people were given laptops.

“It's kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” noted Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

More importantly for many staffers, their favorite ways of communicating with each other (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) were suddenly silenced, as government
regulations clamped down on these methods. (For the other side, read the article from FOXNews where the out-going Bush admin disputes the Dark Age accusation.)

The only surviving "new" technology approved by the White House counsel – and temporarily at that – is the use of gmail
accounts for the press office. I guess all that data now "belongs" to Google – have fun, guys.

Wordpress is the blogging platform of choice the Technorati's Top 100, blog – powering 27 out of the 100, reports Royal Pingdom. Check it out:

Just 8% of these top blogs use a custom-made blog platform, which either means they're not throwing a lot of funds at their CMS, or more positively, that third-party services are doing a darn good job at providing what they need.

Note the distinction, however, between a blogging service (e.g., Typepad, WordPress.com, Blogger) where they handle the software and host for you, and a blogging platform like regular WordPress, Movable Type, etc. where you set up and host the platform yourself.

Interesting tidbit: Blogsmith, which is owned by AOL, beats out (in my opinion) better-known services like Typepad and Blogger, mostly because it is used by Weblogs, Inc. for their supercool niche sites. Second only to Gawker, our favorite sinking ship.

When I saw this headline – "See Dmitry Run, Ski, and Video Blog," I got all excited, thinking that it was going to be the famous phone messsage Dmitri, which if you are in the dating game and haven't heard of him, you are truly missing out. But the actual news is about Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who apparently is a very cool video blogger – even on skiis.

Video and social media has a "significant role" to play in connecting
people and allowing them to engage with each other – and for the Russian
Government it is a way of letting its citizens inside, letting them see
Medvedev as a real person and of having a dialogue with him, writes Social Media Today.

Is that the role of online video with politics? Ever since Obama starting addressing the nation in weekly YouTube addresses, we've been wondering how politicans plan to use the medium. Congress just signed up with YouTube to have its own channels for Senators and Representatives, though so far the platform seems to be just another soapbox for them to promote agendas, and content has been less than popular, with view counts for any given video remaining in the low hundreds, MarketingVOX reports.

The British monarchy and Queen Rania of Jordan both use online video to communicate with their public, with the latter winning YouTube's first-ever Visionary Award last year.

However, given the relatively one-way nature of video, for politics, we're thinking social networks may be the way to go. The kind of levels of engagement and reach that political leaders can get from a place like Facebook (made obvious during the election) still far outweigh the positives of a straight-laced video.

What started as an internal tool to help Ogilvy listen to web conversations about themselves or their campaigns is now public, for any dear marketer who can type TheDailyInfluence.com.

It's a "social media RSS dashboard," Ogilvy said – built on NetVibes, the RSS aggregator akin to iGoogle that many people already use to create customized feeds. And unlike Radian6, another social media listening post, it's totally free.

For that reason, and because it comes with pre-selected feeds from popular social media and technology sites, it's pretty perfect for someone marketing a tech or web product that wants to get a head start on monitoring blogs. (See review.)

More advanced "listeners," however, probably have their own system set up – or if they don't, will want to do it themselves, from scratch. Not to sound too old-fashioned, but there's a lot to be said about actually going through the process yourself.

And P.S. – Ogilvy laid off about 10% of its US workforce – or about 150-175 people (via Adweek). Some sources are saying as high as 300. WPP denied the cuts until, well, about two days ago. But this is just the beginning of thousands that will take place in WPP's agencies as clients slash ad budgets and shift dollars elsewhere, BNET writes.

"If one more person says 'blog' or 'social networking' to me, I'm gonna puke," said the haggard marketing exec. Twice as many marketers said they are "sick" of hearing about Web 2.0 than last year, according to an Anderson Analytics survey for the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG).

But they admit they don’t know much about it. Some 67% of executive marketers consider themselves beginners when
it comes to using social media for marketing purposes, according to a social media marketing study.

Global warming and green marketing are also way less popular this year, as marketers push aside newfangled ideas and go back to basics – putting more focus on the good ol' boys, like research & insights, and satisfying and retaining customers.

After that, marketing ROI, brand loyalty, and segmentation are considered important, marking a serious move back to the core principles of marketing, writes MarketingCharts.

Finally, dread iTunes DRM dies a sorry ugly death .

Now that iTunes has gotten rid of the DRM on its songs, we think some scoflaws will stop downloading illegally on peer-to-peer.  For many, it wasn't the 99 cents that bugged them, it was the digital rights management Apple had to plugged in that made the whole file potentially useless.

This whole thing hurt the record companies and consumers way more than it ever hurt Apple. 

Oh yeah, that's why they call them the record companies.