Wednesday, October 16, 2002

(ok, one last post to clear my desktop!) Newsletters are dead. My email inbox should only contain messages from people I know and trust; in other words, I don't want junk mail! If a company provided the same information as an RSS-style newsfeed, I'd much rather read it in my news aggregator. Why? Because I can maintain control of what I read. If a news feed starts to fill up with junk, or I lose interest, I can simply remove the feed from my aggregator. No need to "unsubscribe" in any of its various forms. As I move to a handheld email client (Danger! Danger!), i definitely need to keep my email address unpolluted. Weblogs are going to become powerful in two places: journalism, and marketing. Journalism because anyone can now aspire to report and comment. Like page layout before it, the cream will rise to the top (Thanks Chuck Geshke for reminding me of your metaphor!) Marketing because it allows marketers to deliver targeted messages to an eager audience. As a consumer, 'll gladly subscribe to a uniquely identified RSS-style newsfeed from Jeep, Nokia, Apple, Canon, Nikon, Magic the Gathering, Gerber, Baby-Center, U2, Steinberg and Propellerheads... Marketers may feel like they are losing control, but they should never have been given such control in the first place. This leads me to the following conclusion: Weblogs are great for permissive marketing. 11:17:09 PM

One of the downsides to a desktop weblogging tool? i'm sending my computer into Apple tomorrow, and will not be able to post to my weblog until it comes back :-( In the meantime, go get a news aggregator and subscribe to some feeds... it's like snow boarding: once you try it, you won't go back to skis ;-) Until I'm wired again... 11:04:17 PM