My dad is nursing an interest in blogging and just asked me a question about how blog posts work with e-mail.
It was a “yes or no” kind of question.
As is my style, I responded with the following treatise, which, to avoid ennui, I’ve broken into two parts.
Does it make it easy for the blogger to send out copies of his work to an address list he has (postings), and what if any limits are there to frequency of mailing, and quantity of addressees?
Before I answer this question, I’d like to see if I can help you skip forward into the “future” a couple of years to show you how the shape of web content delivery is, and, over the last few years, has been, changing and do my best to describe the path down which I believe we are heading.
You have already heard of RSS and Atom. These are primary examples of the Web Feed syndication technical framework.
Until recently, I didn’t “get” RSS. I could see why some people might use it and why some people might find it convenient, but I couldn’t understand what the big deal was. I’d tried it, but I guess I wasn’t surfing enough – more importantly, I hadn’t yet created a feed and I wasn’t using a reader.
Generally, there is a shift underway in web content delivery methodology. That shift is away from the traditional content distribution channel, e-mail, and toward something called web feed syndication, and its associated technologies, Aggregation and Readers. This is partially a precursor to the eventual development Negroponte’s concept of a Digital Butler (services like Netflix, Last.fm and Pandora are already making great strides in this area), but is also as a matter of inherent convenience.
As is currently the norm, most sites offering content welcome you to register your e-mail address and offer to send you electronic mail messages notifying you of new and updated content on their site, conveniently delivering the e-mail message with embedded hyperlinks that will take you back to their site. This is also a technique used by commerce sites as a business driver. We all just got through the double deluge of Holiday and New Year sales.
The big problem with this is that, for the end user, with just a few exceptions, the content delivery is pretty much just regarded as junk mail and is usually treated as such. Anyone who has tried commerce marketing through e-mail will tell you it has a fairly tall conversion ratio. But when you’re sending out a mass e-mail your costs are the same whether your distribution list consists of one person or one million.
QuantumTom 