Cast your mind back 25 years… and you’ll see a world where the Internet was barely imagined, spam was a tinned meat product and the 87 million people who use email every day were, you know, talking to each other.

Back in 1982, a small group of geeks were wondering how to inject some emotion into their online communications. To solve their problem, Scott Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, created emoticons. Staring at the keyboard sideways, he smiled to himself. Then he typed his smile :-)

Within days, the smiley face was sweeping the ARPAnet (the Internet’s precursor) and other emoticons were being created, allowing geeks to show:

• Laughter :D
• Flirtation ;)
• Teasing :P
• Frowns :(
• Confusion :\
• Surprise :O

Today… there are countless emoticons that allow us to add some feeling to our emails, instant messages, blog and forum posts, and even to text messages on our mobile phones. As Fahlman says, it’s hard to convey meaning without body language or tone of voice, so these little faces “humanize what is otherwise a cold medium.”

Happy 25th birthday to the emoticon. Party on! <|:-)

I don’t know about you, but last week I sent nearly 200 emails. Maybe I should adopt Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, “to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book”? I must have written a whole book worth of emails in my lifetime! With so much email rabbiting, I was ashamed to realise I hadn’t the first e-clue about where emails had come from…

With a little digging, I discovered that email was invented in 1971 by Roy Tomlinson, whose company was developing computer networking technology in Massachusetts. The project his team was working on would later become, um, the Internet. Tomlinson had the bright idea of combining two of his own projects and, voila, the first email message was sent. At first, Tomlinson kept the lid on his invention because email had been a pet project he’d done when he should have been doing, you know, work. Today, 87 million people use email to communicate every day.

Some of those people use email marketing as a clever promotional tool, bypassing the letter box (pricier, since the increase to 50 cents to send a standard letter) and going straight for the cyber inbox. With email marketing you can:

• Increase sales and bring customers back for more
• Get useful feedback from clients
• Reach people through one of the most popular applications on the Internet today
• Save money (no print or postage required)
• Get your message out there quickly

Beware though, New Zealand’s anti-spam legislation comes into force on September 1st 2007, so be sure to get up to speed on the new laws and get permission from all those on your mailing list.