Microsoft is blacklisting email addresses from the United Kingdom, in yet another case of overzealous spam blocking. Microsoft is blocking many companies from emailing their customers that use Hotmail, even when they have expressly consented to receiving the emails.

According to e-consultancy, Microsoft charged the company $1700 to get whitelisted so that it could correspond with its customers. Microsoft isn't the first ISP to impede European emails. Verizon also has been blocking emails from e-consultancy and others on the continent, which I discovered last year, and resulted in a lawsuit.

The practice of squeezing commercial organizations to pay higher fees to send emails is just getting started as Yahoo and AOL are very interested in charging companies for the privilege of emailing their customers. Obviously charging companies for the amount of emails that they send hasn't been a deterrent for spammers, but there needs to be a more technical solution than broad embargos that group legitimate enterprises with spammers.

Probably the most compelling use of Web 2.0 technology so far is to mashup images with databases. Adding a visual elements can greatly enhance the power of the information, such as the various Google Maps mashups that automatically plot locations.

One example that is more entertaining than productive is FlickrFling, which interactively visualizes the text from an RSS feed (found via Webmonkey). FlickrFling finds an image from the Flickr database that matches each word from a feed.

There have been many studies about the power of images in increasing the readership of articles as well as the reader's ability to remember, so a business application that plays off the mashup could be effective. How about tweaking the AdSense code to find graphics that would make it more likely to read the ads? Showing, not telling what you have to offer can be much more effective. The Web 2.0 tools will have advertisers thinking visual more than ever before.