According to an article on Globe Technology this week, provisions in Bill C-60 may make Googling illegal in Canada.

The bill, which received its first reading in the House of Commons June 20, bans making copyrighted material available through “information-location tools”, the definition of which includes search engines.

Of course, the bill has received only its first reading and there are bound to be changes before (and if) it gets passed, but this is certainly something to watch for SEO practitioners.

The total number of Internet users worldwide is expected to reach 1.07 billion in 2005 and with an estimated 20.45 million Canadians online, we rank only 12th in size of Internet population. In the number one position, the US still holds a massive lead at 185.5 million Internet users. China is in second place with just under 100 million, followed by Japan with 78 million Internet users.

Switch the data to Internet users as a percentage of total population and we slide into the #10 position, still slightly behind the United States. The world’s most connected country? Denmark, with 68.5% of the population online.

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Stats have no relevance without the context of history.
Some years ago I had a client whose email marketing efforts were generating fantastic results. They went out once a week to a very loyal readership. Then someone read an article about relevant content and decided to publish five different newsletters EVERY WEEK, allowing people to opt-out of various versions when they chose. What happened? Open rates dropped from 68% to 34%.

Unfortunately, the client’s marketing team was completely unaware. They had a fairly low unsubscribe rate from new the five-issues-a-week program and the “industry average” open rate at the time was a 34%. Eager to demonstrate their successes, the team was focused on the positive bytes of information. Open rates were at or just above industry standards and unsubscribe rates were low. Without the perspective of history, these were very positive and promising results.

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How important is it, really, to spam check my email messages before I send them? All that testing just seems like a big waste of time.

Tested Out,
Lethbridge, Ab.

A: Dear Tested;

People like you really test my patience! How important is a spam check? Why don’t you ask the folks who rely on the Indian Ocean tsunami warning system. They discovered, to their chagrin, than SpamAssassin was blocking legitimate tsunami warnings, generated by the system as spam.

Seems that the system sent out an alert to subscribers about a teensy wee earthquake off Northern Sumatra. Just a puny little 6.7 on the Richter scale. But if you were a SpamAssassin user, you didn’t get it because of the sentence “THERE IS A VERY SMALL POSSIBILITY OF A DESTRUCTIVE LOCAL TSUNAMI IN THE INDIAN OCEAN” . Thank goodness - who wants news like that in your inbox!

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