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A very interesting discussion at Slashdot earlier this month about how to stop spam.

There were many suggestions involving images with obscured characters, but that's just not acceptable for business.

A lot of these suggestions are fine for personal sites; but if you're actually in business they aren't practical.We use Javascript. You don't want to make life more difficult for the person trying to correspond - the point is to raise the cost to the spammer. If they have to add a Javascript parser to their spider, it's going to slow them way down. It's not going to make financial sense for them to do a custom solution for each site (and if they do, the "image" methods will break down as well).

What do we do for our own clients to lighten the spam load?

Keep reading Foiling Email Harvesters and Coping with Spam

Veerle Pieters lashed out recently at freeloader clients. The client in question would be a big client (city website in Belgium).

That particular city wasn't content with a design mockup alone oh no they even had the audacity to state that the design revisions to that mockup had to be free too. You only got to have the nerve to think that's normal. This pisses me off and I have one clear message to all those freeloaders "stick it where the sun doesn't shine"! I don't work for free! Somebody has to say it out-loud.

Time to put a stop to it

The purpose of creative pitches are to give clients a better understanding of the creative capacity of the selected agencies. To me it is a lame excuse to not browse around in the portfolios and let someone else do the work for free. I wonder what goes on in the mind of the people who write that stuff down, do they expect the freebies in everything else also? From what understand it is not only a Belgian problem but an international one.

So when was the last time that somebody did a day of work for free for you? Think about, let a painter do a few rooms as a proposal and maybe you'll order the rest later. Good luck in finding one that will do so. Those RPF's are 8 to 10 pages if you are lucky and doing everything to the letter it will cost at least a day of work.

From my time working in major advertising agencies, I know we do these things free all the time. We used to call them pitches. The creative department (I was television production) would end up staying all night for a couple of nights doing mockups, phony storyboards, new looks. The account executive types would be putting fat binders of research together.

Keep reading A Short History of Free Proposals

For the company lunches, I just bought an enormous 10 litre Tescoma home profi soup pot.

I was curious about the company who made this fine piece of stainless steel.

Looking them up Tescoma in Google coughed up this great case study of the company history. It turns out that Tescoma is a about a ten year old company which went from water coolers to cookware, selling tens of millions of dollars of cookware around the world.

Keep reading Eastern European Success Stories for the Taking

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