On Thu, 26 May 1994 23:51:00 EDT, Russell Nelson wrote:
>It's a nice business, but MS-DOS is going away.  I need to find the
>next thing to do.
 
Probably not as quickly as Mr. Bill wants it to, there are lots of academic
LANs that can't afford the hardware cost of *ahem* upgrading (?) everyone
to WinDOZE (we're still running more than 100 386SX boxes with 2 MBytes or
RAM; they'll run WinDOZE but its REAL UGLY.
 
>What I *want* to do is sell a service that adds value to mailing
>lists.
 
Pardon me for kibbitzing here, but you probably CAN setup to offer a
service that might make big bucks (in fact, I might even want an
opportunity to invest in it :-)  There are LOTS of hosts that don't offer
NetNews (mine for instance--we've got it under consideration and at the
rate the bureaucracy moves we might have the whole thing in two years or so
:-(  If you could offer a service that would let individuals subscribe
(send and receive) to SPECIFIC news groups that for whatever reason aren't
crossed to the LISTSERV system--at some cheap rate, say only $1 per month
per group--you probably could clean up to beat the band.  I'm in marketing,
not law, I have no idea what sort of legal or copyright issues you might
get entangled in, and you'd have to have some rational policy on how to
deal with all those students that would want to subscribe to various
alt.sex.depravity titles.  As for moi, there are some comp.sys.* groups I'd
like to have access to.
 
Eric's correct that large organizations *could* organize the same service,
but many (mine for instance) won't, and there are more and more people who
have email access to the Internet from all sorts of providers that seem to
be springing up like the proverbial jack rabbits in mating season.
 
Collecting, say $1.25 a month isn't a problem if you take the trouble to
contract with MasterCard & Visa (and bill for several months at a time with
a "cover" charge to pay the bank cards' administrative fees).
 
Your biggest threat is how do you keep Compu$erve from competing against
you (answer be reasonable--they'll prefer to buy you out because you'll
have a ready made subscriber list--as long as you don't over value your
service your retirement could be assured :-)
 
>trying to serve J. Random mailing list is going to be a problem.  Some
>mailing list administrators wish to control precisely who receives and
>who sends mail on their lists.  They certainly have the right to make
>those decisions.
 
I don't think there's nearly as much of a problem providing one-way (you
can read but you can't necessarily reply) access to lists.  Your service
might be a valuable one for the cyberly challenged.
 
>I'm "making money off your efforts"...
 
Perhaps, perhaps not.  News clipping services also make money in a similar
way.  Nothing you do prevents anyone from net access from learning to
subscribe directly to most lists, and MANY people already pay for access to
lists (through portal, the Well, and others).  Your offer of "one stop list
browsing" might fly.
 
You might also think of running an "automated" clipping service.  Let
people define a set of keywords (with appropriate boolean logic, i.e.,
macintosh or powermac and not "flame on" for example) to receive messages
from all lists or a defined subset (comp.sys.* for example).  Cable
companies already supply software that selectively "clips" text from the
Reuters newswire based on user defined keywords.
 
/s Murphy A. Sewall <[log in to unmask]> (203) 486-2489 voice
   Professor of Marketing                          (203) 486-5246 fax