Kind of BusinessView Wordpress Theme

This is probably the world’s greatest WordPress theme. That Guy brings a suave and deadly Gary-Oldman-as-Patrick-Bateman quality to fake reading that you just don’t see in enough headers for “Business Blogs” these days.

[Many thanks to Matt Jones]

I’d previously requested Cision scrub me from their lists, and [NAME OF PERSON] said “I will remove your listing immediately” (5/14/2008). I have no reason to think he/she was anything but honest in this regard.

Since recently blacklisting the email addresses of every PR company I could locate, my volume of PR spam has gone way down, but the occasional message from a new company gets through.

That’s what happened today when I asked where the intruding PR person got my email address (“Cision,” she said, as if I were asking where babies come from). This led me to share my frustration on Twitter.

So. Anyway. This morning, I wrote back to [NAME OF PERSON] and asked him/her to take me off their lists. Again. Here’s what I said:

Hi, again, [NAME OF PERSON],

Today I received another unsolicited email from one of your clients. They said they got my contact information from Cision. That’s disappointing to me.

[NAME OF PERSON], I’d be grateful if you would assign someone to ensure that every trace of my personal information is scrubbed from your lists. I’d also appreciate your assurance that my info won’t pop up on these lists again.

This is very important to me, [NAME OF PERSON]. I’m sure your clients value knowing that they’re not being directed to someone who’s actively hostile both to unsolicited PR contact as well as to having their personal information misused.

Many Thanks,
Merlin Mann

We’ll see what happens next.

Here’s the thing: Cision is a big business, and I’m sure they’re smart enough to do the right thing and stop circulating the contact information for people who don’t want to be contacted. But, they need to make getting off existing lists really easy and decisive for people to do — especially given that we never asked to be on those lists — and you shouldn’t have to do what I did, wardialing email addresses until you find one person in the company with the decency to respond and (theoretically) fix the problem.

It’d be a bummer if Cision decided that this wasn’t something to work on. Because I’m confident in telling you that they’d be marching their paying clients into a bad place where the influence they’re trying to beg, borrow, or steal can be used to drop a very heavy, very pointy portcullis.

Eleanor + Sandwich

I like both these people a lot.

My Bride: The Early Days

This photo from January, 2000 still delights me. Less than a month after we met. Day she moved in. Now the mother of our child.

Feed The Animals

This new Girl Talk record is a stunning tour of the last 40 years of popular music [buy]. The enumerable and wildly satisfying samples are like snorting fucking Pixy Stix, and, although they’re a lot more fun to pick out on your own, wiki-pee has an exhaustive cheat sheet if you get stumped.