As Inboxes Choke, Email Publishing Pioneer Opts for RSS
Chris Prillo literally wrote the book on email-based publishing back in 1999: Poor Richard's E-mail Publishing was a widely recognized "bible" on how to best use this publishing medium for newsletters and other communications. But as reported by Editor & Publisher, he is actively encouraging e-mail subscribers to drop their accounts and teaching them how to get the same content via RSS (RDF Site Summary), the format that is used to publish Weblogs and allows people to subscribe to postings as a content channel. This avoids putting valuable content in the "spaminator" channel, and in theory increases the likelihood that it gets read and taken seriously. Does this spell the end for email newsletters? Probably not: RSS is an extremely powerful tool for enabling individual publishers, but the ability to forward and annotate incoming content for peers easily will keep email the champ channel for some time to come. Publishing is not just about getting content to audiences; it's also important to empower audiences to republish and amplify content easily and fairly. RSS is great, but its feature set is still very young.