Acxiom Digital President Kevin H. Johnson discusses the differences between traditional DM and online marketing:

The true divide between digital and direct marketing is driven by one simple economic fact: cost per incremental online contact is effectively zero. Once you have set up an e-mail program and a Web site, each incremental e-mail or page view can be delivered for tenths of a penny (or even less).

The Digital Divide: Differences Between Online and Offline Direct Marketing
DMNews.com

It won’t exactly tell you whether or not you’d make a good Postmaster, but it’s a fun postal trivia game- Postmaster’s Challenge at the Smithsonian’s Postal Museum web site.

(via the Stamp Collecting Roundup)

After posting the “Aunt Minnie” item last week, I started wondering about Auntie’s origins. The web makes it easy to look for obscure things like that, although actually finding them may be a different story. Aunt Minnie shows up in Victorian era stories, and popular plays from the 1920’s and ’30’s, but the oldest specifically postal mention I found was from 1949- a story in the New York Times describing a railroad car fire that had destroyed a large amount of mail. The story noted that “Postal Inspectors are salvaging what they can and passing it along to the addressees. But there are some persons who will never get the letter that Aunt Minnie mailed last week in Long Beach…”

The most interesting story, though, was from 1970, Read the rest of this entry »

I have to admit I missed it, but a week ago Tuesday was sort of the eighth birthday for what later became postalnews.com. It was on April 18, 1998, that I posted the following notice in the alt.snail-mail newsgroup on USENET:

From: postalnews
Date: Sat, Apr 18 1998 12:00 am
Email: postaln…@altavista.net
Groups: alt.snail-mail
For the latest postal news, check out Postal News Online at: http://members.xoom.com/postalnews/index.htm

It’s updated daily, and provides links to news stories about the US Postal Service, its employees, customers and competitors.
—–== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==—– http://www.dejanews.com/

(For those of you who may not have been surfing the web back then, USENET was a network of discussion groups that was probably the liveliest, most interactive service on the Internet prior to the World Wide Web.)

Postal News Online started on the old Xoom.com service, one of the early do-it-yourself web site hosting companies. By September of 1998, Postal News Online was attracting a regular daily readership, and I registered the domain name postalnews.com, and moved the site to a regular, commercial web hosting service.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the original Xoom site, but you can see an early version of postalnews.com, from January 1999, at web.archive.org. (Note: for some reason the Postal Service blocks archive.org on its internal network, so you won’t be able to see the archive if you’re on a postal computer.)

Google Groups : alt.snail-mail