Briefly Noted for October 6, 2009

Gmail Helps Spam Be More Annoying? — Yesterday Google began rolling out a new “feature” called “enhanced email” to some Gmail users. As reported by ReadWriteWeb, the “enhancement” is the ability for messages to update themselves in real time, for example by pulling a company’s latest deals into a marketing email sitting in your inbox. The problem is, right now it’s limited to “certain senders,” i.e. certain companies like Netflix. As long as “enhanced email” remains limited to e-commerce outfits, this seems to me like little more than “enhanced spam.” In Google’s defense, you’ll only be getting these messages from companies with whom you have a prior email subscription—and I guess I can imagine some more productive uses of the technology—but it still kind of seems like a kind of push-button web version of the animated .gif.

Work at MITH! — Our friends at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) are looking to hire an Assistant Director to join their management team. It looks like a great gig for someone with at strong humanities background, web programming skills, and project management experience.