During my long no-blog period, I kinda lost the unconditioned reflex “This is interesting, let me blog it” in favour of the less advanced “This is interesting, let me think about who might be interested and send her an email containing just this link”.
At least this is something that was happening with my previous blog post, I was starting to think who might be interested in knowing that “Italian public television (RAI) will be entirely under Creative Commons” in order to send them an email. Luckily a strike in the blue sky of my mind came to rescue me with a providential “why don’t I blog it so that I don’t clutter their mailbox and … if they want to read, they simply come here, when they want? Moreover the possible readers might include people I don’t know that find the post after months via a search engine.”
I strongly rationally believe that Email is where knowledge goes to die, I just think I lost the unconditioned reflex.
By the way, the metaphor of blogging as writing an email cc:World is due to Doc Searls.
Ramblings by Paolo on Web2.0, Wikipedia, Social Networking, Trust, Reputation, …
If someone is interested in all your posts than reading your blog is efficient. If someone is interested only in some subjects than you sending her and email when you write about her subject would be more efficient for her. You cannot believe that cc the whole world with all that you write is more efficient than choosing those that have interest in the subject – this is increasing the overall information that needs to be read – this is increasing the information glut. Instead if you target the information than the overall amount of information read by people will be less – but still efficient.
Hi Zbigniew!
I think it is the difference between “push” and “pull”.
Email is a pushing ecology: if enough people start sending you emails (pushing) you will be overwhelmed, moreover you leave other people decide what is relevant for you (it can happen that you keep receiving email from someone that you don’t consider highly relevant or worse).
Blogging is a pulling ecology: everyone publish and make it available for the world, then it is up to you to get some information (pulling) or not. You decide what is relevant.
The other great advantage of blog posts over emails is that they are permanent, they can be found later on, indexed, cited, … while knowledge simply goes to die in an email.
Anyway I don’t believe email is the correct tool for sending links, the tag “for:yourname” on del.icio.us might be a better way, even if it remains a push technology.
One of my “desiderata” is to get totally away with email, never ever use it. I’m still trying to figure out how to do it.
There is place for both push and pull technology (and publish subscribe too). The point is that it is the sender that knows more about the message and the receiver knows more about his interests – to have full efficiency you need both sides, unfortunately this is not possible, but anyway the optimum is sometimes more on the sender side sometimes more on the receiver side. Publish Subscribe – where you can push the messages and receivers pull messages from channels that are really interesting to them is a good compromise here (with the cost of another redirection layer), but you’ll still need sometimes to have channels like for:yourname. Unfortunately it seems that today my wiki is down – but I had a treatment on that subject there.
And I guess comments on blog play a role as well …
Thanks for your comments! ;-)
Here it is: http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/index.cgi?PushVersusPull
i wrote something similar when i started my blog…eheh
phauly, i write just to tell u thanks fotr your comments on my weblog and that…if u continue inviting me in trento, i could come one day! eheh
ps:nice & interesting the Fair during which the picts have been taken .
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