This is a plea to web designers, programmers and, most particularly, marketing people, to stop annoying us when we want to unsubscribe from your &^%$#@!* stupid, er, sorry, not interesting to us, email lists. It's also a plea for all of you IT people to talk to these groups in your company and convince them to do some "right thinking" about this issue.

Hoarding shows are popular these days. Hoarders, Hoarding: Buried Alive, Confessions: Animal Hoarding and on and on. The images are consistent: Boxes stacked to the ceilings. Piles of newspapers dating back to the Nixon era. Feral cats skittering behind furniture. Empty cans of cat food, beans and soup scattered everywhere.

Skype this week launched the GroupMe app for Windows Phone, following its August acquisition of the tool that enables free, real-time group texting. GroupMe lets you communicate instantly with up to 25 colleagues using chat, photos, and location sharing.

Before I get to this week's main topic I must give a big thumbs-up to a book that all of you who like to cook will thoroughly enjoy: "Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food" by Jeff Potter (pub. O'Reilly).

Smartpen vendor, Livescribe, has inked a partnership with Scholastic to expand its retail, commercial business and education footprint in the market.

A new and different looking for Gmail is now landing in users' inboxes.

Skype, which Microsoft bought in May, said Monday it will buy the group messaging service GroupMe. GroupMe, created last year at the Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon, went for a rumored $85 million, according to AllthingsD. For now, GroupMe will remain a standalone application, according to the company, but expect changes.

I heard on the grapevine today that the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) has reported the theft of a computer that contained the personal details of 66,000 of its members.

Marketing gurus pushed email newsletters hard back in the days before social networking. If you believe everything you read online these days, you'd think that Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other Web 2.0 services have left such vehicles in the virtual dust. Not so. Nor has the scourge of spam destroyed newsletters' effectiveness. Email marketing still achieves huge results--and pairing an effective email newsletter with a social media campaign can snag many more customers for your business than relying on social media alone.

Communication is the lifeblood of productivity. Businesses need to communicate with customers, managers need to communicate with employees, and workers need to communicate with peers. Effective communication is a crucial element of getting things done.

Embedded in the heel of his shoe was an early example of the Internet of Things -- but Andrew Duncan didn't know it at the time.

Eight percent of online Americans may use Twitter, as the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported on Thursday. But does that mean your small business should use the service in its marketing and communications efforts?

Have you checked your work e-mailtoday? If you're like most employees in the United States and United Kingdom, the answer is yes despite the fact that it is not only the weekend, but an extended holiday weekend for most workers in the US. A day off is becoming an increasingly foreign concept as workers stay connected virtually 24/7.

In the early days, Gmail hooked us with its innovative features, like the way it threaded together e-mails under the same subject.

Last week's online protest against Microsoft Outlook is turning out to be a tempest-in-a-Tweet.

A writer's group I belong to wants to put on a conference this summer. Since I've written about two of the leading e-mail marketing services, Constant Contact and VerticalResponse, I volunteered to manage the messaging process and send out the e-mails. It's been interesting, meaning there's both good and bad details to report, but mostly good in that the messaging part of my job was pretty easy. The non-technical parts got a bit wonky, however, and I have three lessons to pass on.