I haven’t used TrafficZ in a couple of years, and it was for just a brief period of time. However, today I received an email from them sent to their clients:

“Dear valued TrafficZ client:

We hope this email finds you well. We have attempted to contact you previously regarding the collection of tax related documentation relating to your TrafficZ account. In order to make payments to our clients, TrafficZ is legally required to collect certain tax related documentation from all of our clients, including those based outside the United States.…”etc.

This email continued, but that isn’t the problem here. Unfortunately, the sender of the email didn’t blind carbon copy the 1,500+ email recipients. Every single email address that was on the mailing list was left for all others to see. This is a huge invasion of privacy, as one person already decided to spam the list with his crappy domain names. This is the spam email I just received from someone harvesting the list:

“Dear TrafficZ User,

Sorry to inconvenience anyone but your email, like mine, was just released by TrafficZ. I apologize having to use this method but its awfully ironic that I just got handed a list of people who buy and sell domain names just as I determined I really need to sell two of my domain names in the very near future…”

“If you are the least bit interested please let me know. I need to make some money ASAP to keep paying off my damn Adjustable Rate mortgage.

Sorry for any inconvenience,

Jesse Lakes“

Shame on TrafficZ for not managing their email list better, and shame on this person for sending this annoying spam email.

As I continue to work on Lowell.com in anticipation of an early March launch, I would like to reveal our new logo. I wasn’t 100% thrilled with the logo that was selected before, and I was concerned about a potential trademark issue in the last logo. As you may recall, the logo I selected had an image of Boott Mill in Lowell, which is owned by the National Park Service. While it may have been okay to use the image on my logo, I was concerned about the impact of using the logo for commercial purposes. I intend to make shirts, hats, mugs and other giveaways, and I didn’t want to run into potential issues down the road.

I think this new logo is colorful and fun, and it looks nice. What do you think of the new logo? I would love to hear comments. We are not 100% ready to launch yet, so minor changes could still be made if you have any suggestions!

We are getting down to the wire, and it’s getting very exciting. I look forward to sharing the website with you when it’s ready to launch. I may need some testers to check links, grammar…etc, and if that’s the case, I may reach out. I really appreciate all the advice and guidance that has been given to me throughout the development process. (more…)

According to today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, another potential Yahoo suitor has entered into negotiations. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, owners of popular social networking site MySpace, has begun negotiating with Yahoo to combine these two Internet powers. The article mentions that News Corp. could receive a stake in excess of 20% of Yahoo.

In recent weeks, merger and acquisition talks involving Yahoo have included many suiters, including Microsoft (who made a $44.6 billion offer), Google, AOL, and possibly others. These talks have helped push up the value of Yahoo stock over the past couple of weeks. In my opinion, the acquisition talks are a sign of strength for the domain industry, as it shows other companies with Internet experience are bullish on Internet advertising and search. While this ultimately may not be the best for PPC income, I think it shows faith in our industry.