Subject: Re: [Asrg] 6. Proposals - depracate all list/bulk mailing and changeto RSS

From: Bill Pease <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 12:11:59 -0800

>Email is being abused as a broadcast medium.  By deprecating all mass
 >mailings, and going RSS (i.e. pull feeds), we will cut the rug out from
 >under the feet of so-called "legitimate bulk e-mailers".  Such a thing
 >will no longer exist by definition.  They will stick out like sore
 >thumbs.  Legitimate communities of interest can use RSS or internal
 >usenet feeds or web-bords or whatever.

To recommend that "legitimate communities of interest" abandon their 
current communication practices and switch to a distribution mechanism 
that has virtually no market penetration seems as extreme to me as 
attempting to redesign SMTP from the ground up to cure the spam problem.

RSS feeds have a long way to go before legitimate email publishers (such 
as all of my company's clients - member-based organizations like 
AFL-CIO,  Public Broadcasting System, American Red Cross - would be 
willing to abandon push email for pull news aggregators.  In summary:

Audience Reach Limits:
*RSS readers have very limited market penetration (<5%), requiring 
installation of additional software into email client, browser or desktop

Feature Limits:
*Limited to no support for graphically-enhanced content
*Limited support for variety of content types typical in newsletter 
publishing
*No support for content customization or personalization based on 
subscriber attributes
*Limited support for tracking subscriber interaction with content
*No support for various transactions that can be enabled within email 
(e.g., donation, viral marketing).

See 
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/features_columns/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1963664
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3070851
http://rss.lockergnome.com/archives/services/007074.phtml
http://rss.lockergnome.com/archives/opinion/006902.phtml

for some balanced discussions within the email publishers world about 
the potential advantages/disadvantages of RSS as a distribution channel.

-- 
Bill Pease, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer
GetActive Software
2855 Telegraph Avenue, Suite 600
Berkeley, CA 94705
p: 510-540-4772 x101
f: 510-540-4163
e: [email-masked]
w: http://getactive.com

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From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 15:23:50 -0500

Bill Pease wrote:
> willing to abandon push email for pull news aggregators.

Would email publishers be willing to pursue the "pull" approach to the 
extend that they are willing to sit down and work out the different 
issues involved? Or is "pull" currently a "non-starter" in those 
communities?

Yakov

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Yakov Shafranovich / asrg <at> shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / research <at> solidmatrix.com
  "Why are both drug addicts and computer aficionados both called 
users?" (Clifford Stoll)
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