One of the pleasures of an otherwise meritless fantasy sports habit is learning to evaluate games and players in different ways. Baseball fans, for instance, will be at least passingly familiar with OPS, an only recently-popularized statistic for evaluating a player's offensive contribution more deeply than a batting average. Football Outsiders has done wonders -- and unearthed hidden insights, many rapidly becoming conventional wisdom -- with unorthodox analysis of NFL games.

So my ears perked up when the indispensable Progressive Exchange mailing list took an innocuous inquiry about mailing every month as opposed to every other month* and galloped into a conversation about what metrics like e-mail open rates measure and whether they really matter.

Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies struck the tocsin thusly:

We all — myself included — pay far too much attention to these measures because they are so easy to get. But are they really telling us anything important?

Is your goal for a newsletter really to get them to click to your site, or is it to bond them to the organization?

Sam Smith's Progressive Review recovers a document that should look familiar to anyone who's written a grant proposal.

We have read your "Declaration of Independence" with great interest. Certainly, it represents a considerable undertaking, and many of your statements do merit serious consideration. Unfortunately, the Declaration as a whole fails to meet recently adopted specifications for proposals to the Crown, so we must return the document to you for further refinement.

The rest on the flip...