Hello,
My name is Ariel Poler and I am the CEO of Topica. I am not a regular
subscriber to this list, but I was forwarded some of the recent posts
regarding Topica, and I thought it was important to say a few words:
First, I want to apologize to anyone who received unsolicited email from us
that you considered inappropriate. It is definitely NOT our intention to
send messages that are considered to be inappropriate (particularly by list
owners). On the contrary, we have been working very hard for over one year
to build a service that we hope is of great value to the list owner
community, and have obtained a great deal of feedback from many list owners
in doing so (some of whom I know are members of this list).
While I realize this is somewhat ironic, the reason behind the "unsolicited
" messages is our strong believe that list owners should control their
lists' information. See, one of the services that we are offering is a
public directory of email lists. While we have collected the information by
working closely with existing public directories such as Liszt, PAML, and
Tile.net, we want to make sure that owners are aware that their lists'
information is in our directory, and that they have the opportunity to
modify it, or even remove it. So we have started to contact list owners to
give them such an opportunity. There is, of course, the catch: some of you
obviously considered these messages to be inappropriate. So we are faced
with the following challenge: how do make sure list owners are in control of
the information that we have in our directory about their lists, without
communicating with them about it?
Our decision was to send one email to the owner of each list giving them the
ability, on an ongoing basis, to modify or remove their list's information
from our directory. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to determine
when a single person is the owner of multiple lists, so some owners of
multiple lists received multiple messages.
For the same reasons, we have also been sending one email to the owner of a
list the first time that someone submits a subscription request to their
list through our service. We decided that it was important for list owners
to be aware that their lists were in our directory, and that people could
submit subscription requests through it.
I would greatly appreciate your suggestions on how we can better balance
keeping list owners informed and empowered, without sending email that some
consider inappropriate. We have received very encouraging feedback from
numerous list owners and subscribers regarding the value that we are
providing with our directory and related services, so we need to balance
this as well, i.e., making sure that we continue to provide significant
value added to the email list community. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Ariel Poler Tel: 415-344-3811
CEO, Topica Inc. Fax: 415-344-0900
620 Folsom Street #300 Cell: 415-613-6098
San Francisco, CA 94107 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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