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Barilla is offering to send your friends a free "postcard from Italy" with a personalized message from you and a picture of an Italian landmark.

The catch is that the postcards are mailed domestically but, since it's free, who cares? Click here to send one.

Magazine and catalog publishers know that everybody hates blow-in cards -- the postcards that fall out when you read. Yet they keep on putting them in. I just got a new WIRED Magazine with three blow in cards and a fashion supplement I won't read, all bound up in a polybag.

Like many consumers, I'm tempted to send the blow-in cards back blank. Many people have suggested this over the years. But how much will it really cost WIRED and dissuade them from these totally annoying, eco-unfriendly tactics? How many people would it take to do it? According to Direct Marketing Magazine, they do it because the cost of blowing in a card that I'll ignore is about half the cost of sending out a letter I'll ignore. But the response rate is abysmal: only 0.35%. That means they have to do 300 cards to get one back. The 2006 story put the cost at $30 to $40 per thousand.

If WIRED conformed to all those norms, it would be spending about 3.5 cents per card put in the magazine and roughly $10 for every card it gets back. (It's offering subscriptions at only $8 year, but that's part of the fuzzy economics of magazines today, which are supported more by ads than sales.)

I checked with the post office to see how much postage they would pay for every card returned. A high volume mailer like WIRED has to pay several thousand dollars a year in fees, then 24.7 cents per card actual postage and .006 cents for processing under its special Business Reply Mail permit. So, basically it's a quarter for every postcard. Let's assume WIRED wouldn't consider the blow-in cards attractive if the cost doubled -- making it the same price as mailing a letter. What would it take for the process to cost $30 more per thousand? At 25 cents a pop, it means that 120 of 1,000 postcards would have to make it to the mailbox. That's what I think it would take to get the blow-in cards to stop: better than one in 10 people sending the cards back blank.

Are you up for joining me?

Here's a neat idea: you know all that junk mail you get that you toss immediately into the recycling bin? Well what if it came from your Aunt Mildred, congratulating you on your promotion? Would you give it a second look?

Enter HippoPost.com: You fill out the form, choose an image, type in your message, and they send it to whomever you want. They even pay the postage, and stick an advertisement on it to, hopefully, eke out a small profit.

With postage rates increasing so fast that it's cheaper to hire a Wal-Mart employee to bicycle across the country and hand-deliver a postcard, I can see hippopost catching on big time. Give it a try! It's a nice alternative to an email.