In 1991, a federal law called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act made it illegal to send unsolicited commercial faxes. Makes perfect common sense: Why should I have to pay for paper and toner for you to spam me with ads?

Here’s an interesting article about junk faxing and a lawsuit in Missouri. Personally, I’m more interested in this article about three companies recently settling junk fax class action lawsuits.

One of those companies, Kappa Publishing, will be paying out $1.5 million, plus $560,000 in legal fees and expenses, plus another $65,000 for administrative expenses — a total of $2,125,000 for engaging in an activity that everyone agreed more than a decade ago was illegal.

Kappa Publishing is a former employer of mine.

So that’s how schadenfreude feels.

“No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work.”
—Mother Teresa

This is a useful site if you travel a lot with your laptop: It’s a global list of wireless hotspots.

(Thanks to Todd Cochrane over at Geek News Central for the heads up on this one.)

Nielsen/NetRatings reports in their Monthly Featured Analysis on the Top 10 Online Web Brands, ranked by fastest year-to-year growth. Apple is #1, having grown 57% over the past year, thanks to iTunes. Google is second (29% growth), followed by Amazon (16%), MapQuest (13%), and Real (12%).

Even if you clicked through to the PDF of the release to get the rest of the top 10, you may not have noticed the section at the bottom of the release: “Younger Visitors Hit Fastest Growing Web Sites.”

Among the 12-24 set, social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, and Memegen (make your own quiz!) have grown 752%, 530%, and 446% respectively. They rank second through fourth. Photobucket, used to host many of the photos that appear on those sites, was number one, growing 1,492% (that’s not a typo).

Takeaway for marketers: If any of this comes as a surprise to you, it’s time to go read this Business Week article about the “MySpace Generation.”

You’re no doubt familiar with Google image search and Google news and maybe even Google’s Froogle shopping search. Now comes Google music search. This one, I thought, is right up my alley. So I gave it a whirl by searching for “Springsteen.”

Okay, this was cool: “Land of Hope and Dreams” (otherwise known as *ahem* LOHAD) was the top result of any Springsteen song. But it also showed two songs titled “Springsteen,” one by Princess and one by Whitford. Interesting: I hadn’t heard of either one. Tell me more.

This was not so cool: Trying to find information about Princess, I click on the band’s name: I get pretty much the same information I got from the music search — a CD cover thumbnail — but with the added bonus of “buy me now!” links to music stores like iTunes, eMusic, and artistdirect.com. Whoa! I don’t even know what I’m looking at, what’s with rushing me to buy? So I click on “artist websites,” figuring I’ll get some band information. Nope: Princess Cruises, Princess Bride, Princess Mononoke. So I go back in my browser one step and click on the album title link in the search results. I get a list of tracks. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. I click on a song title and get — no information, just “buy me now!” links to iTunes and eMusic.

A search for “Sinatra” fared only a little better: two of the three album results included links to reviews: one from Blender, one from Epinions. Now we’re on the right track. If we’re going to have a Google devoted to music, let’s do more than provide relentless sales links. Let’s get some actual information in there.

Someday, maybe Google music search will find its groove. I hope it does. For now, though, it’s back to the garage for a lot more practice.