“Email was the Internet’s killer app. As few as ten years ago it was possible to correspond with a vast group of individuals you didn’t previously know scattered across the globe. But no longer. In a few years I anticipate not even having an email address any longer, unless things change drastically to increase the signal to noise ratio.”
That’s what I wrote at the end of 2001 and since then the email situation has gone from bad to worse. I now get much more spam—by at least an order of magnitude—than legitimate email. Of course I use tools so I almost never see any of that spam, but it’s merely an arms race. The spammers learn to defeat the anti-spam tools, which beget more powerful tools, which result in more powerful filters, and so the cycle continues. Even though the arms race continues, the war is over. The spammers won. Email, for anything other than communicating with individuals you already know, is useless.
Online publishers are struggling with the loss of the spam war, because email was one of the best publishing tools the non-corporate media has ever seen.
In my day job at Utne, we publish two email newsletters; one weekly and one thrice weekly, so I have a vested interest in email newsletter publishing. I hate to see it go, but going it is. Not next year, and probably not the year after, but the war is over. Chris Pirillo and I, along with countless others, are experiencing the same frustration and anxiety; call it The Fear.
Pirillo grew a media business solely on email publishing and has invested a lot of resources on email delivery of publications; perhaps more than any other micropublisher. But, as he wrote in his flagship Lockergnome newsletter two Mondays ago he’s abandoning email as a publishing medium:
“I sit here, in my comfy chair, surfing on a wireless Internet connection, grooming my inbox and deleting 90% of what’s sitting in there. Why? It’s junk. It’s useless. This used to be my playground, and it was once the avenue through which I could deliver my thoughts to hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world. I’m not the only one who has to put up with unsolicited advertisements for sending money to a country that doesn’t exist on any world map. Worse yet, my wife is getting e-mails that promise to increase the size of a part of her body that she doesn’t have.”
There’s a rather good chance that if Pirillo subscribes to one of the Utne email newsletters, they comprise part of the 90% of what he’s deleted from his inbox. I say that with some certainty because I know that I’ve deleted some of his publications from my inbox. It’s not because they’re crap; rather, it’s because they come at an inconvenient moment, or my inbox has become too cluttered, or I’m suffering one of my regular information overdoses. For any number of reasons I perform regular purges of my inbox, and most likely so do you.
And here’s where The Fear comes in. Utne‘s email newsletters, like Lockergnome’s, are opt-in. You have to go out of your way to actually subscribe to them before they start showing up in your inbox. Even then, chances are that up to 38% of each mailing gets snared in various spam filters, innocent victims of the spam arms race. Collateral damage of the spam war, as it were. That’s enough to keep an email newsletter publisher up at night. Cold sweats, the whole bit.
Pirillo nails the situation:
“If the world was a perfect place, e-mail publishing would still be a viable model for getting the word out. But marketers and morons (two groups that are far from mutually exclusive) have flooded the space with noise. So now, instead of spending our time on crafting quality content, we waste it with endless bickering. We now have to fight with ISPs, begging them to let our messages pass through without being filtered or flagged. We have to go out of our way to educate anti-spam solutions on our product to make sure we don’t get blacklisted. We have to explain to our subscribers how someone between here and there is possibly blocking the transmission, possibly troubleshooting their software, trying to figure out if there’s a utility that’s keeping them from receiving the stuff they asked for. Ugh.”
The universal antidote to The Fear, as Pirillo, myself, and many others have found, is already at hand: RSS. It’s one of those techie acronyms that stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary depending on who you ask and the phase of the moon. RSS enables online publishers to distribute (or “syndicate”) content—at various levels of granularity from headlines to full stories—instantly. Dan
Gilmore
Gillmor (thanks xian) covered RSS in one of his recent San Jose Mercury News columns. Similarly, Ryan Singel covered using aggregators to manage information overload for Wired News.
You can begin using RSS today, right now. Download one of the many RSS readers (many are free, called “aggregators” or “newsreaders”) and add this link:
as one of the news feeds. Now, whenever I publish an article on this site, you’ll be notified within an hour of its availability. Want more? They’re called “feeds.” Look for the little orange XML and RSS buttons on your favorite websites and add those links to your aggregator. If the sites you frequent don’t sport such a badge, demand it. An immediate benefit is that you can now browse hundreds of sites in the time it used to take for a handful.
Looking for a specific aggregator recommendation? I’m currently using NewsGator because it seamlessly integrates with Outlook; Mac users should take a gander at NetNewsWire.
Congratulations and welcome to the bleeding edge of the Web. Hang in there, the aggregators will get more usable as we collectively figure this out.
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