How to Stop Receiving Phone Books and Yellow Pages
By leelefever on August 16, 2007 - 5:08pm
You've likely seen it before, you come home to find a bag of useless phonebooks on your porch. I realized recently that I haven't used a phonebook or yellowpages in years - I take them straight to recycling. They are dinosaurs.
This got me thinking - shouldn't I be able to opt-out of automatic delivery? Wouldn't there be a significant impact if everyone stopped receiving phonebooks and yellow pages? Apparently the major players pumped out 540 million directories this year.
This is insane and wasteful and I want people to know they can opt-out. Below are the numbers to call for the major distributors of phone books and yellow pages (none have online forms as far as I know). Simply call the numbers and tell them you want to opt-out of delivery - it takes a few minutes. I called all the ones below myself.
AT&T/YellowPages (formerly SBC and Bell South):
1.866.329.7118
Verizon (Idearc):
1.800.888.8448
Dex:
1.877.243.8339
Yellow Book:
1.800.373.3280 or 1.800.373.2324
The major players use a tactic called "saturation distribution" that means that you may get books even if you don't have a land line.
PaperlessPetition.org is one of the only resources I found who is working on this issue. From their site:
...expedite an end to this needless environmental waste, educate consumers on free and easy alternatives, and shed light on the growing inaccuracy of readership statistics that drive advertisers to still invest in this antiquated medium.
If you're interested, you can get a badge here.
Plenty of Fish and Dating Site Disruption
By leelefever on June 11, 2007 - 10:03pm
If you haven't heard about Markus Frind and his dating site at plentyoffish.com, you will.
Markus is singlehandedly disrupting the dating site industry by offering a free alternative to pay-to-play sites like match.com. What makes his story so interesting is that he is the site's only employee - he runs the whole site from his Vancouver, Canada apartment and makes millions of dollars from Google ad revenue.
Here are some of the basic facts from a recent Wall Street Journal story (via: online personal watch):
View With CommentsGoogle's Target Marketing
By leelefever on July 13, 2004 - 7:55am
For those of you not in Silicon Valley (like me), this is a billboard is part of a hiring strategy that Google is using to find "only the smartest engineers".
