By Mark Frauenfelder
Like many people, celebrities are turning on to the joy of e-mail. But unlike their poorer and more obscure fellow Net surfers, the rich and famous have to keep their Net addresses unpublished to avoid getting buried under. (Remember what happened to Bill Gates when The New Yorker ran his e-mail address? After averaging about one message a day from outside strangers, he suddenly found himself dog paddling hopelessly against a tsunami of 5,000 unread messages and had to change his address.)
So why did Seth Godin (sgp@sgp.com) publish E-Mail Addresses of the Rich & Famous, a list of nearly 1,000 people categorized under headings such as "Experts," "Authors," "Celebrities," and "The Richest Americans with E-Mail?" Godin claims his book will give "regular people" the opportunity to chat with people "who can wield some influence." I e-mailed eight people listed in the book and asked them how they felt about being included in E-Mail Addresses of the Rich & Famous. Here are the results:
Douglas Adams: "I try, for obvious reasons, to keep my home address and phone number as private as possible, but I'm happy for anybody to have my e-mail address." (Adams, however, was not pleased that Godin published his CompuServe address and wished that he had run his other e-mail address instead: adamsd@cerf.net.
Edward Asner: No response.
John Barlow: "Oh, sure. What the hell. I feel naked to the Net anyway. Might as well make it easier for the people who really want to get through to me and don't know how. Besides, I've finally realized that I'm under no moral obligation to reply to that which I haven't solicited, which is immensely liberating."
Pat Buchanan: "Mail Delivery Failure. Receiver not found."
Jed Clampett: "The mail you sent could not be delivered; it was addressed to an unknown AOL user (jedclampet)."
Charles Grodin: "The mail you sent could not be delivered; it was addressed to an unknown AOL user (charlesgrodin)."
Marvin Minsky: No response.
Roger Ebert: "I specifically asked them not to put my e-mail address in the book, pointing out that I pay my dues by freely participating in a CompuServe Forum. I think the book will simply drive the so-called "rich and famous" offline or into pseudonyms, and is much the same as selling maps of movie stars' homes. I think any review of Godin's book would not be complete without publishing his e-mail address, which is 76004,2554 on CompuServe."
I asked Godin to comment on the 35 percent miss rate in my sample mailing, and why he didn't ask the people he listed for their preferred addresses. "We used our best efforts to check for accuracy," he replied, "but didn't write to each included person, as we felt that this would get us [an] incomplete response at best." I guess for some people, quantity is more important than accuracy.
E-Mail Addresses of the Rich & Famous, by Seth Godin, US$7.95. Addison Wesley: (800) 322 1377, +1 (617) 944-3700.
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