The IHT design hasn't been adopted by more news sites for several reasons:
* The scrolling is nonstandard and creates as many user experience problems as it solves.
* Implementing it with cross-browser compatibility is a nightmare. That's less of an issue with current browsers than it was a few years ago, but there still are a lot of old browsers in the user base.
* Most news sites have high demand for ad slots (which enables them to be free to the user) and the IHT layout doesn't accommodate that.
So, apparently he alone, has figured out the solution for all newspapers? Some of his comments are valid, but his whole idea of a comment and moderation system probably won't work for lots of smaller newspapers because they probably won't have enough online readers that such a system would be feasible.
Rob Miller isn't alone in figuring it out; in fact, nothing in his essay hasn't been extensively discussed and/or actually executed by some existing newspaper companies. (I am a journalist turned Internet media strategist and am right in the middle of this issue.)
The community online interaction model -- which I call participative interaction, not "citizen journalism" -- works very well in small newspaper markets.
My company has one site in a market with about 16,000 households. We gave a blog and a photo gallery to every user and built the website around community interaction. Some of the website content flows into print.
The user-driven website is currently turning more than 40,000 unique users per month and the newspaper has actual measured daily readership numbers over 70 percent (more than twice the national average).
Newspapers aren't organically doomed. Companies that fail to react to change are doomed. That's true in any industry, especially technology.
Kadin's post was modded as "insightful," but it is unfortunately myopic.
Certainly the United States does not suffer the kind of devastating water shortages that are common in many third-world countries. But saying there is no water problem in most of the United States is like making claims about the climate based on local weather snapshots.
Water shortages do not necessarily manifest themselves at the surface. What aquifer underlies the region in which you live? What has happened to that aquifer over the last 50 years? Is it being drawn down? Is it being polluted? Do you have any idea? Do you actually think that's a municipal-level issue?
There are serious, underpublicized water shortages all over America. Some of them relate to surface issues like processing and distribution capacity. Some relate to pollution -- especially agricultural pollution -- and infiltration issues. Some have to do with depletion of deep resouces. You won't find out about it in the blogosphere. It's the kind of thing that newspaper reporters cover for lengthy, boring Sunday articles (that hardly anybody reads).
Casting this as a big-government vs. little-government issue suggests that you didn't read the Los Angeles Times article. This isn't about Uncle Sam coming to take away your favorite potty.
This is about the Uniform Plumbing Code, which is drawn up by a nongovernmental trade association and used as a basis for local building code enforcement efforts. And it currently prohibits urinals that don't use water to flush.
So now anyone in the US that has a blog is considered a journalist? What kind of perks do you get when you're a journalist?
That's easy. Low pay, bad hours, little job security, lots of crank phone calls, and predictable abuse from wingers of all stripes.
Re:Uhm, been running on my server for months....
on
Gallery 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Gallery2 is free software developed with the "release early, release often" philosophy, so of course it's been available for some time. But it's also been a moving target in terms of filesystem layout and API. Emerging from beta is NOT a small deal. It means that developers of add-ons can proceed with some confidence that the entire system won't turn to smoke with the next dot release.
I've been using it in a high-volume production environment since April Fool's Day. We plan on dumping it next week and moving to our own code. It's a very nice system (and a tremendous leap forward from Gallery 1), but it's wedded to a folder organizational metaphor, and we need a richer taxonomy to support potentially tens of thousands of users.
Here's why the mayor of New Orleans didn't use the buses: He doesn't run the school district, which has been a complete organizational disaster for some time. Cities and school districts are not the same thing.
The person you label as an "idiot democrat mayor" didn't make the mess. He is a relative political outsider, a former Cox cable executive, who was a Republican until he decided to run for mayor of a traditionally Democrat city.
He has been on a campaign to clean up the extremely corrupt New Orleans government, working actively with the FBI.
Maybe you should read something other than right-wing hate blogs.
Let them eat cake
A saying that shows insensitivity to or incomprehension of the realities of life for the unfortunate. Rousseau, in his Confessions, tells of a great princess who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, "Let them eat cake." This statement is often, and incorrectly, attributed to Marie Antoinette.
In contemporary terms, it might be expressed as "why didn't they load up their SUV's and drive to Baton Rouge like the smart white people did?"
A wiki is an ideal tool if you want to have multiple users writing and revising the same document(s). It's focused on rewriting and revising. Typically a wiki journals all transactions, so if someone makes a mistaked (or defaces the system), you can roll back. If you have a need to build a knowledge base, documentation, et cetera, it may be an ideal tool. But your users need to be cooperative with one another and working toward a common goal, and willing to compromise. (This is why the LA Times' recent "wikitorial" experiment was a dumb idea from the start.)
Drupal is a CMS that can provide workflow for editorial processes, so an author's work can be reviewed before it "goes live," and some documents can be made editable by groups of users, but it's a very different model froma Wiki. Drupal also provides an excellent shared blogging platform. If your intranet goal is internal communications and possibly discussion, Drupal is an excellent choice. If your intranet goal is to develop a knowledge base, pick something like MediaWiki.
I've built several sites on a Drupal foundation, including one significant community newspaper site that provides free blogs and photo galleries to thousands of community members. I'm very impressed with Drupal. Here are the major strengths and weaknesses as I see them.
Strengths:
* Stability. * Scalability. Configurable page caching is in the core feature set. Session data is in the database, so if you need to serve to the whole planet, you can deploy an array of web servers. * Extensibility. There's a very well-documented module API and a number of community-supported extensions that use it. A module called Flexinode lets you easily define new structured content types. * Integration. The authentication system can interoperate with a number of external sources, ranging from LDAP to LiveJournal. There are plug-ins for ecommerce payment systems, Amazon, etc. * Presentational flexibility. There are several optional templating engines; one (PHPTemplate) supports full PHP functionality, so you can not only customize the look and feel, but also easily integrate all sorts of information from non-Drupal sources without cursing. Content and presentation are reasonably well separated. Modules tend to assume that HTML is the target output format, but even that could be changed with some PHPTemplate magic. * RSS support. Just about everything can have its own feed, and file attachments automatically become enclosures. Result: Instant podcasting.
Weaknesses: * Forums. The message board module is basic and does not, for example, let you promote a comment to base note status, or even move a comment from one thread to another. * Photo gallery support. The standard stuff is weak, no competition for Gallery. There is no support for integrating Gallery 1. There is a Gallery2 integration module, but G2 is unfortunately a flaky, poorly documented moving target.
If you're one of those poor souls who can't appreciate the pure joy of two slices of spam with cheap yellow mustard on white bread, here's an alternative that you should try:
1 small onion 1 can Spam 2 inches cut from the end of a block of Velveeta
Peel the onion and chop it in a food processor. Add the Velveeta and chop for a short burst. Then add the Spam and chop only long enough to blend the results -- you're don't want to turn it into a paste, you want to leave the Spam somewhat chunky.
Spread the result thickly on a hamburger bun or English muffin, and place Spam-side-up on a tray under the broiler until the cheese melts.
What is the benifit on their side for the public to register to read articles online? Just to be able to sell their emails?
Here's an explanation.
1. Registration provides the newspaper with the ability to accurately analyze usage. This includes usage by demographic segment: by ZIP, by age, by gender. This information is extremely valuable in the advertising sales process, but also in business decisionmaking.
2. Registration supports targeted delivery of advertising messages. Extreme example: All females age 35-44 who live in ZIP codes 10019, 10023, 10024, 10025 (Manhattan Central Park West and South). If you're selling Manolo Blahnik shoes, you don't want to pay to advertise to some geek in Sammamish, WA. Such targeted advertising -- whether delivered via email or via Web-based targeting -- supports a radically higher CPM (cost per thousand) ad rate than generic Internet ad inventory. With registration, the Times can deliver high-priced ads to those neighborhoods and "junk inventory" low-priced ads to some geek from Sammamish, WA.
I have no doubt that the Times' database includes a substantial percentage of idiots who provide false information, but liars very rarely provide false information that can be mapped to actual addresses. A simple bit of data scrubbing will remove liars from the mix and the result is a highly valuable targetable data set.
Smaller newspapers that have instituted registration more recently than the Times generally find that 95 to 98 percent of registered users provide accurate information.
It's not just about AskJeeves, it's about the entire stable of sites/brands/technologies that it owns: Teoma (search technology), Excite, iWon, MyWay and Bloglines. In that collection, there's actually more usage outside the Ask brand that inside it. Here's a recent snapshot.
The problem arises from the existence in some jurisdictions, including California, of a "shield law" that protects journalists from having to reveal their sources.
Most journalists strongly favor shield laws, because it helps them do their jobs -- a source can speak to a reporter in confidence, just as a client can speak to an attorney. Or a pentient to a priest, a husband to a wife, et cetera. There are several such cases where testimony may not be compelled.
However, a shield law for journalists places journalists in the uncomfortable position of being "defined" by the government.
As much as we journalists -- and I've been a journalist for more than 30 years -- want to be protected from ad hoc molestation by lawyers (representing any side) we also don't want the government defining who is, and who is not, entitled to be a journalist. We cling to the First Amendment rather fiercely.
The First Amendment says no law may abridge "the freedom of speech, or of the press." It does not say anything about professionalism, or corporations, or newspapers. It's a human right belonging to all people that is recognized by the proscription on government interference.
Those days, and the business model that supplied them, are long gone... or perhaps not
Timothy is often reposts previously posted news because he doesn't look first. In this case, he should have looked up netzero and juno, which are still around, still offering free ad-supported dialup access. They actually merged into one company, United Online, in 2001.
The business model is to give away ad-cluttered free access -- which is limited to something like 10 hours per month -- and try to upsell you to their $9.95 and $14.95 premium plans, which do not install an ad panel.
ArtistShare has a patent application that would cover its business model:
The present invention is directed to a system and method for raising financing and/or revenue by artist for a project, where the project may be a creative work of the artist. The method including registering, by at least one artist, with a centralized database, at least one or more projects, offering, by the at least one artist, an entitlement related to the artist in exchange for capital for the project of the artist. The method and system may also include searching, by an interested party, the centralized database, for the least one artist, registering, by the interested party, with the centralized database and accepting the offer by the interested party for the entitlement related to the project. The capital may then be forwarded to the artist and the entitlement provided to the interested party.
But if you think Gore did NOT play a major role in creating the Internet, then you've bought into a big lie circulated by right-wing politicians starting with Dick Armey, who originally misquoted Gore.
Gore was discussing his legislative record. Anyone who looks into that record can easily see that Gore was a leader in the 1980s of a faction called the "Atari Democrats," who believed the industrial base of the United States had to shift from heavy industry to technology.
When DARPA pulled back from funding non-military uses of the fledgling TCP/IP network, Gore was instrumental in getting the National Science Foundation both the funding and the jurisdiction to create NSFNet, which became the core of the public Internet.
It is conservative economic dogma that private enterprise will make everything just peachy if we just keep the government from intervening.
But private enterprise had no incentive to create a public Internet; on the contrary, private enterprise had an incentive to create instead a series of private networks (generally running proprietary protocols).
By declaring that the nation needed an "information superhighway" for the new era and throwing government support and funding behind an open network standard, Gore was instrumental in breaking that logjam and -- yes -- creating the Internet.
It is hard these days for simple things like facts and public records to compete with the drumbeat of spin, misinformation and outright lies that has come to characterize "political discourse." Both the mischaracterization of Gore's statement about the Internet and the miscasting of the pragmatic moderate Vermont Governor Howard Dean as a screaming "ultra-liberal on social issues who is out of the mainstream and wrong for America" are examples.
It's not just OSS; Microsoft's own stuff doesn't necessarily work properly with restricted rights. The printer spooler on one of my home computers refuses to work, and in order to let my kids print anything, I had to turn off the spooler (which essentially hangs the computer until the printing is done). I have similar problems with peons and non-OSS third-party software, such as HP's software update tool.
Spam is wrong, and there is no exemption for spam sent via a subscription based service. What counts is if the recipient interprets it as spam.
Again, the FTC did not define "spam." It defined mail that can be considered "commercial" and therefore subject to the rules laid down by the CAN-SPAM act.
If an email is considered "commercial," it is not necessarily prohibited. You should read the entire act carefully. It doesn't prohibit transmission of emails that have been requested by the recipient, and when you subscribe to an email list, you are doing exactly that. The inclusion of advertising in the list may cause it to be subject to rules governing false headers, opt-out (unsubscribing), et cetera, that do not necessarily apply to purely private mail. But that should not create a problem for any competently run commercially backed list.
Yahoo's business model for it's mailing list service (Yahoo Groups) is to attach ads to 'legitimate' mail it's users send.
These mails fit the new definition of spam: "bulk e-mail is commercial if it includes advertising and promotion ".
This is very wrong, and it's unfortunate that someone moderated it up. The rules clearly address "primary purpose." The FTC has no authority to ban sponsorship messages in Yahoo Groups emails, whose primary purpose is other than to deliver that advertising, and whose delivery was specifically requested by the recipient.
In addition, the headline on this slashdot posting is wrong, as is the summary. The FTC specifically says:
A few comments suggested definitions of the term "spam." In the CAN-SPAM Act, Congress set forth a regulatory scheme built around the defined terms "commercial electronic mail message" and "transactional or relationship message." Because this structure is provided in the Act, it is unnecessary to define the term "spam" in the context of this rulemaking, and the Commission declines to do so.
The FTC is not trying to keep advertising out of subscription-based services.
Slashdot Mirror
The IHT design hasn't been adopted by more news sites for several reasons:
* The scrolling is nonstandard and creates as many user experience problems as it solves.
* Implementing it with cross-browser compatibility is a nightmare. That's less of an issue with current browsers than it was a few years ago, but there still are a lot of old browsers in the user base.
* Most news sites have high demand for ad slots (which enables them to be free to the user) and the IHT layout doesn't accommodate that.
Rob Miller isn't alone in figuring it out; in fact, nothing in his essay hasn't been extensively discussed and/or actually executed by some existing newspaper companies. (I am a journalist turned Internet media strategist and am right in the middle of this issue.)
The community online interaction model -- which I call participative interaction, not "citizen journalism" -- works very well in small newspaper markets.
My company has one site in a market with about 16,000 households. We gave a blog and a photo gallery to every user and built the website around community interaction. Some of the website content flows into print.
The user-driven website is currently turning more than 40,000 unique users per month and the newspaper has actual measured daily readership numbers over 70 percent (more than twice the national average).
Newspapers aren't organically doomed. Companies that fail to react to change are doomed. That's true in any industry, especially technology.
Kadin's post was modded as "insightful," but it is unfortunately myopic.
Certainly the United States does not suffer the kind of devastating water shortages that are common in many third-world countries. But saying there is no water problem in most of the United States is like making claims about the climate based on local weather snapshots.
Water shortages do not necessarily manifest themselves at the surface. What aquifer underlies the region in which you live? What has happened to that aquifer over the last 50 years? Is it being drawn down? Is it being polluted? Do you have any idea? Do you actually think that's a municipal-level issue?
There are serious, underpublicized water shortages all over America. Some of them relate to surface issues like processing and distribution capacity. Some relate to pollution -- especially agricultural pollution -- and infiltration issues. Some have to do with depletion of deep resouces. You won't find out about it in the blogosphere. It's the kind of thing that newspaper reporters cover for lengthy, boring Sunday articles (that hardly anybody reads).
Casting this as a big-government vs. little-government issue suggests that you didn't read the Los Angeles Times article. This isn't about Uncle Sam coming to take away your favorite potty.
This is about the Uniform Plumbing Code, which is drawn up by a nongovernmental trade association and used as a basis for local building code enforcement efforts. And it currently prohibits urinals that don't use water to flush.
That's easy. Low pay, bad hours, little job security, lots of crank phone calls, and predictable abuse from wingers of all stripes.
Gallery2 is free software developed with the "release early, release often" philosophy, so of course it's been available for some time. But it's also been a moving target in terms of filesystem layout and API. Emerging from beta is NOT a small deal. It means that developers of add-ons can proceed with some confidence that the entire system won't turn to smoke with the next dot release.
I've been using it in a high-volume production environment since April Fool's Day. We plan on dumping it next week and moving to our own code. It's a very nice system (and a tremendous leap forward from Gallery 1), but it's wedded to a folder organizational metaphor, and we need a richer taxonomy to support potentially tens of thousands of users.
Mod parent down as "clueless."
n s.schools.ap/
Here's why the mayor of New Orleans didn't use the buses: He doesn't run the school district, which has been a complete organizational disaster for some time. Cities and school districts are not the same thing.
For a taste of just how bad the school district has become:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/08/18/new.orlea
The person you label as an "idiot democrat mayor" didn't make the mess. He is a relative political outsider, a former Cox cable executive, who was a Republican until he decided to run for mayor of a traditionally Democrat city.
He has been on a campaign to clean up the extremely corrupt New Orleans government, working actively with the FBI.
Maybe you should read something other than right-wing hate blogs.
A wiki is an ideal tool if you want to have multiple users writing and revising the same document(s). It's focused on rewriting and revising. Typically a wiki journals all transactions, so if someone makes a mistaked (or defaces the system), you can roll back. If you have a need to build a knowledge base, documentation, et cetera, it may be an ideal tool. But your users need to be cooperative with one another and working toward a common goal, and willing to compromise. (This is why the LA Times' recent "wikitorial" experiment was a dumb idea from the start.)
Drupal is a CMS that can provide workflow for editorial processes, so an author's work can be reviewed before it "goes live," and some documents can be made editable by groups of users, but it's a very different model froma Wiki. Drupal also provides an excellent shared blogging platform. If your intranet goal is internal communications and possibly discussion, Drupal is an excellent choice. If your intranet goal is to develop a knowledge base, pick something like MediaWiki.
I've built several sites on a Drupal foundation, including one significant community newspaper site that provides free blogs and photo galleries to thousands of community members. I'm very impressed with Drupal. Here are the major strengths and weaknesses as I see them.
Strengths:
* Stability.
* Scalability. Configurable page caching is in the core feature set. Session data is in the database, so if you need to serve to the whole planet, you can deploy an array of web servers.
* Extensibility. There's a very well-documented module API and a number of community-supported extensions that use it. A module called Flexinode lets you easily define new structured content types.
* Integration. The authentication system can interoperate with a number of external sources, ranging from LDAP to LiveJournal. There are plug-ins for ecommerce payment systems, Amazon, etc.
* Presentational flexibility. There are several optional templating engines; one (PHPTemplate) supports full PHP functionality, so you can not only customize the look and feel, but also easily integrate all sorts of information from non-Drupal sources without cursing. Content and presentation are reasonably well separated. Modules tend to assume that HTML is the target output format, but even that could be changed with some PHPTemplate magic.
* RSS support. Just about everything can have its own feed, and file attachments automatically become enclosures. Result: Instant podcasting.
Weaknesses:
* Forums. The message board module is basic and does not, for example, let you promote a comment to base note status, or even move a comment from one thread to another.
* Photo gallery support. The standard stuff is weak, no competition for Gallery. There is no support for integrating Gallery 1. There is a Gallery2 integration module, but G2 is unfortunately a flaky, poorly documented moving target.
If you're one of those poor souls who can't appreciate the pure joy of two slices of spam with cheap yellow mustard on white bread, here's an alternative that you should try:
1 small onion
1 can Spam
2 inches cut from the end of a block of Velveeta
Peel the onion and chop it in a food processor. Add the Velveeta and chop for a short burst. Then add the Spam and chop only long enough to blend the results -- you're don't want to turn it into a paste, you want to leave the Spam somewhat chunky.
Spread the result thickly on a hamburger bun or English muffin, and place Spam-side-up on a tray under the broiler until the cheese melts.
Nobody's an idiot for wanting to protect their personal privacy. The test is how they go about it.
Here's an explanation.
1. Registration provides the newspaper with the ability to accurately analyze usage. This includes usage by demographic segment: by ZIP, by age, by gender. This information is extremely valuable in the advertising sales process, but also in business decisionmaking.
2. Registration supports targeted delivery of advertising messages. Extreme example: All females age 35-44 who live in ZIP codes 10019, 10023, 10024, 10025 (Manhattan Central Park West and South). If you're selling Manolo Blahnik shoes, you don't want to pay to advertise to some geek in Sammamish, WA. Such targeted advertising -- whether delivered via email or via Web-based targeting -- supports a radically higher CPM (cost per thousand) ad rate than generic Internet ad inventory. With registration, the Times can deliver high-priced ads to those neighborhoods and "junk inventory" low-priced ads to some geek from Sammamish, WA.
I have no doubt that the Times' database includes a substantial percentage of idiots who provide false information, but liars very rarely provide false information that can be mapped to actual addresses. A simple bit of data scrubbing will remove liars from the mix and the result is a highly valuable targetable data set.
Smaller newspapers that have instituted registration more recently than the Times generally find that 95 to 98 percent of registered users provide accurate information.
>>If Bush said the same thing, he would never be allowed off the hook and would receive 10x the bashing.
In what parallel reality did Bush serve in Congress?
Is gas cheaper there?
Yes.
It will be clear when you understand why 6x9=42.
It's not just about AskJeeves, it's about the entire stable of sites/brands/technologies that it owns: Teoma (search technology), Excite, iWon, MyWay and Bloglines. In that collection, there's actually more usage outside the Ask brand that inside it. Here's a recent snapshot.
The problem arises from the existence in some jurisdictions, including California, of a "shield law" that protects journalists from having to reveal their sources.
Most journalists strongly favor shield laws, because it helps them do their jobs -- a source can speak to a reporter in confidence, just as a client can speak to an attorney. Or a pentient to a priest, a husband to a wife, et cetera. There are several such cases where testimony may not be compelled.
However, a shield law for journalists places journalists in the uncomfortable position of being "defined" by the government.
As much as we journalists -- and I've been a journalist for more than 30 years -- want to be protected from ad hoc molestation by lawyers (representing any side) we also don't want the government defining who is, and who is not, entitled to be a journalist. We cling to the First Amendment rather fiercely.
The First Amendment says no law may abridge "the freedom of speech, or of the press." It does not say anything about professionalism, or corporations, or newspapers. It's a human right belonging to all people that is recognized by the proscription on government interference.
You see the dilemma.
It's not the domain name. It's the traffic, the audience that potentially would click on CPC ads.
Timothy is often reposts previously posted news because he doesn't look first. In this case, he should have looked up netzero and juno, which are still around, still offering free ad-supported dialup access. They actually merged into one company, United Online, in 2001.
The business model is to give away ad-cluttered free access -- which is limited to something like 10 hours per month -- and try to upsell you to their $9.95 and $14.95 premium plans, which do not install an ad panel.
Same people? Maybe.
But if you think Gore did NOT play a major role in creating the Internet, then you've bought into a big lie circulated by right-wing politicians starting with Dick Armey, who originally misquoted Gore.
Gore was discussing his legislative record. Anyone who looks into that record can easily see that Gore was a leader in the 1980s of a faction called the "Atari Democrats," who believed the industrial base of the United States had to shift from heavy industry to technology.
When DARPA pulled back from funding non-military uses of the fledgling TCP/IP network, Gore was instrumental in getting the National Science Foundation both the funding and the jurisdiction to create NSFNet, which became the core of the public Internet.
It is conservative economic dogma that private enterprise will make everything just peachy if we just keep the government from intervening.
But private enterprise had no incentive to create a public Internet; on the contrary, private enterprise had an incentive to create instead a series of private networks (generally running proprietary protocols).
By declaring that the nation needed an "information superhighway" for the new era and throwing government support and funding behind an open network standard, Gore was instrumental in breaking that logjam and -- yes -- creating the Internet.
It is hard these days for simple things like facts and public records to compete with the drumbeat of spin, misinformation and outright lies that has come to characterize "political discourse." Both the mischaracterization of Gore's statement about the Internet and the miscasting of the pragmatic moderate Vermont Governor Howard Dean as a screaming "ultra-liberal on social issues who is out of the mainstream and wrong for America" are examples.
A simple explanation is not hard to find.
It's not just OSS; Microsoft's own stuff doesn't necessarily work properly with restricted rights. The printer spooler on one of my home computers refuses to work, and in order to let my kids print anything, I had to turn off the spooler (which essentially hangs the computer until the printing is done). I have similar problems with peons and non-OSS third-party software, such as HP's software update tool.
Again, the FTC did not define "spam." It defined mail that can be considered "commercial" and therefore subject to the rules laid down by the CAN-SPAM act.
If an email is considered "commercial," it is not necessarily prohibited. You should read the entire act carefully. It doesn't prohibit transmission of emails that have been requested by the recipient, and when you subscribe to an email list, you are doing exactly that. The inclusion of advertising in the list may cause it to be subject to rules governing false headers, opt-out (unsubscribing), et cetera, that do not necessarily apply to purely private mail. But that should not create a problem for any competently run commercially backed list.
This is very wrong, and it's unfortunate that someone moderated it up. The rules clearly address "primary purpose." The FTC has no authority to ban sponsorship messages in Yahoo Groups emails, whose primary purpose is other than to deliver that advertising, and whose delivery was specifically requested by the recipient.
In addition, the headline on this slashdot posting is wrong, as is the summary. The FTC specifically says:
The FTC is not trying to keep advertising out of subscription-based services.
When Microsoft activates Skynet, the error-prone users will no longer be an issue.