I was asked to look at Zoodaka, a new blog broadcasting service. It makes a blog’s RSS feed into an email, which can be delivered whenever there’s new content, or sent as a digest, weekly or monthly. They have fun widgets like a subscription counter, and ways to make your e-mails look pretty.
With any email marketing program, spamming is going to be a major issue. Any free, mass-mailing program has a huge potential to be abused. Zoodoka has a what they call a double opt-in method, which means you sign up on the site and then you receive a confirmation email to make sure you really want to get Zoodoka updates. I’m usually not a fan of confirming an action I just chose (honestly, VISTA, I wouldn’t have clicked “install” if I didn’t want to install NWN, and yes, I’m sure!), but we all get enough spam. Zoodoka’s also pretty actively deleting accounts of spammers, which makes me happy.
Zoodoka does everything that my dear, departed Bloglet used to do. (I’m still upset about that site disappearing off the face of the planet one day, and taking my mailing list with it.) Zoodoka’s been acquired by the guys at PayPerPost, which means they probably won’t be going the way of Bloglet anytime soon. It does mean that zany buzzwords like “customer love” are becoming more common.
