Carrying the Lantern

I find it amazing, and pretty sad, that nearly a decade after e-mail quickly permeated the corporate world, so little help is available to me to effectively and efficiently use e-mail.

Spam? Not an issue anymore from my perspective. Sure it wastes bandwidth on the internet, but it doesn't get to me, either at home (thank you dot Mac and Mail) or at work (thank you Joint Staff and Outlook).

But the constant pull to use this communication method for doing task management has revealed the dramatic gap between what I want to do with e-mail and what I can do. Some newer apps show promise (e.g., Kubi), but in my DoD environment many obstacles to adoption persist. For example, one common obstacle to many corporations (including DoD agencies) is scale. E-mail is huge and adding functionality to the installed base (whether client side or server or both) is just too onerous a task for most. Anyhow, ...

Click through to the paper by Whittaker and Sidner of Lotus Development Corp for an interesting conversation starter and reasoned thinking about this situation.

..........

Predicting Email Actions.

I've long thought that email clients are due for an overhaul. I enjoyed this paper from the SIGCHI 2005 conference. It's as enjoyable for their work done as it is for the overview of prior art, which includes this Life Hacks-ish note:

Whittaker and Sidner [27] also examined how people responded to the abundance of electronic mail they received. According to them, people fell into one of three categories, depending upon the strategy they used for handling email: frequent filers constantly cleaned their inbox, spring cleaners cleaned their inbox once every few months, or no filers did not clean up their inbox and used search tools to manage it. Research to identify and compare different strategies for email management has continued.

The paper they cite, Whittaker and Sidner is excellent. Now to tie down the authors of Outlook and Mail.app, tape open their eyelids, and force them to read it ...

- Posted by William A. Riski - 9:49:12 PM - comment []

Todd Cochrane, one of podcasting's pioneers, has authored a book on podcasting. Not shipping yet, but should be good. I've been listening to Todd's Geek News Central podcast for months and have come to like and trust his work. Stay tuned for a book review soon after my copy arrives.

..........

I have received about a 100 e-mails from people that only get the RSS feed for this website, asking me where they can buy my book on Podcasting so I am embedding my Amazon Associate Ad in the text so those of you on News aggregator will have a shot at it.

Podcasting; The Do-it-Yourself-Guide by Wiley Publishing under the Extreme Tech Series

I have setup a special e-mail account at podcastbook@gmail.com and I have also setup a special voice mail hotline that I will reveal when the book is actually being shipped I want to hear your testimonials or your concerns.

You can help drive sales by linking to this article Thanks.
http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/004327.html

- Posted by William A. Riski - 9:45:30 PM - comment []