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E-mail Newsletters Switching To RSS
prostoalex writes "The wide spread of unsolicited e-mails is leading publishers and site owners towards subscription-based RSS, the InternetNews.com article says. Chris Pirillo from LockerGnome is quoted saying that people just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters anymore, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer. This short article on About.com also argues for the RSS as preferred format for newsletters, site headlines and all sorts of updates that were e-mailed to customers before."
Most RSS readers support HTTP's Conditional GET mechanism, which only downloads the full file if the modified date in the header is different than your last version. This means you can check for updates with tiny (~200byte) requests. For more info, see HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers.
Why do the publishers just not do something like a moderated newsgroup on a restricted server? It seems like that would provide a better solution and the end user tools are already out there (apparently in better forms than what the article describes the RSS tools of being).
"Publish" by presenting a publicly accessible RSS feed
/. by using the RSS plugin for Trillian, and usually tend to look only at stories that look interesting from the titles that are displayed in its main window. How is that having "to pull a stack of books off the shelf just to read the last page"? If I see a link to a story that looks interesting, I can go straight to it, or I can go to the /. home page and look through everything.
"Subscribe" by using an aggregator program or something else that polls that RSS feed
I personally keep up with
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
I personally can't stand web forums and that ubiquitous UBB. The interface is shite, and a poor replacement for NNTP. It's all about control and things like integrating advertising. Groups.google.com is far more production for searhing discussions than trying to go through those horrible web boards on www.google.com. A lot of the free software and GNU web boards have by far the worst interface too, and are even harder to follow threads on. Furthermore, I like having one consistent and well performing interface (either my email or news client) than having to deal with tonnes of horrendous web sites.
Just say no to web boards and use a moderated mailing list or Usenet group. Actually, I don't see much spam on my ISPs news server, so they must do a good job filtering - completion on the text groups is good too (no idea about binaries).
Some objections to this have been (1) how do you process the payments without giving control over the internet to some evil corporation? (2) it's impractical to redesign the e-mail protocols and infrastructure, (3) mailing list operators can't pay to send every e-mail. Well, #1 is obviated by schemes like hashcash, where there's no real money involved. Re #2, this RSS example shows that the e-mail infrastrucure can and will be replaced, and there are ways to do it without having to make everybody change over to a new system overnight -- it can be done piecemeal. The RSS system may also show that #3 is not such a big deal, because maybe newsletters shouldn't go through the same channels as e-mail. (Note that the US postal service doesn't deliver newspapers.) Also, #3 was kind of silly anyway, because people can have a whitelist, and exempt people on their whitelist from paying to send them e-mail.
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I run a website (The View From The Ground) that uses an email newsletter that monitors what the city, police, and other agencies are doing in Chicago public housing (the projects) because there is absolutely no public accountability. We don't spam, don't release our email list to anybody. We're very disciplined about the privacy of our list.
We've thought about going to RSS, but there are big advantages to using an email newsletter for such a purpose.
While our email publication is "unwelcome" in places like the police department in the sense that they rarely like what we have to say, everyone from top administrators to low level officers read it because it scares them. There have already been several successful lawsuits and many major news stories (in the Chicago locals like the Tribune and Sun-Times and some nationals like the New York Times) that generate public scrutiny.
Now, imagine people at the police department or the Chicago Housing Authority, whose technical proficiency is often, uh, lacking, setting up an RSS reader and subscribing to our feed in order to receive our publication. Further, email is easy to forward, and we often get feedback that reveals a long and sordid chain of forwards until it reaches the person in question. We have received amusing lawsuit threats (one from a major company president for "deflamation") with such histories attached. RSS feeds don't have the same forward-ability as email.
Not all email that is received in a spirit of hostility is spam, and sometimes, even if the receiver hates the message, they have to read it. But that's only if they get it. RSS significantly raises the barrier of entry, particularly for people without lots of Net savvy.
This isn't not to say we're not working on implementing RSS. We are, and expect it to dominate the friendly/sympathetic side of our distribution list once we implement it as a distribution method this fall.
The point is that email is still a killer application of the Internet for distributing journalistic content, and that RSS and email can coexist in a mutually beneficial way.
I hate to say it, but the only way we'd become RSS exclusive would be if the next version of IE (which may not appear for years) ships with a super-easy RSS feed reader because almost every city agency in Chicago is MS-exclusive. Until then, we'll do both.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
There is a big difference.
For example a web page is "pull" meaning that you have to request it in order to have it. You know the address of the server you request info from.
An email is "push" because anyone can send you email if they know your address.
Pull is better in the sense that it permits you to only accept communication from the publishers you selected. You could do the same for email and only accept mail from ppl and publishers in your address book for example but in some case you do want "unkowns" to contact you. Whereas you positively dont want "unknowns" to contact you regarding "newsletters" and such.
You might say then that we would be better off then reading the "newsletter" (or whatever) off the publishers web site. The thing is that RSS enables you to aggregate all those items from different sources together as opposed to going to all the websites.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
I personally can't stand web forums...
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Now, there are problems associated with this, but I think people are missing the point that this isn't (yet) a drop in replacement for grandma to get her quilting newsletter.
/. style comment system and the newsletters could become quite an interesting niche in the internet over the next few years.
RSS is a relatively new creation, especially in terms of popularity and I think there are a large number of geeks like myself that will definitely like being able to pull the few newsletters or lists we like. Especially if they pull headlines and still make you request delivery or actually visit a web site.
I personally have loved watching readers (aggregators) develop and mature, as well as more sites coming online with content for them. I think this is certainly one of the things to watch as it is morphing the way we use the web.
Kind of like the evolution of blog style web sites that report news and commentary, so I don't have to hit the estimated 50 billion hardware review sites each day just to see what they have been playing with. Used with a
And yes, if it is popular Microsoft will probably make a stand alone reader or more likely bundle it with IE or Outlook Express.
When I first complained that SpamAssassin blocked their newsletter, and merely asked if they could look into it, I was laughed at, and they tried to convince me that I needed to whitelist them or, in their words, "...learn how to use your spam blocking software".
Ironically, months later, they signed up for Habeas signatures on their emails.
It's interesting that NOW they decide to look into RSS as a solution. I wonder if it is because Habeas isn't working.
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
Did it ever occur to anyone that most Listservs are TWO-WAY systems, and RSS syndication is a ONE-WAY system? If I want to reply to a list, I just reply via email, on most systems the message is instantly distributed to the list. This will never ever happen with RSS. RSS is a one-to-many distribution system, mailing lists are many-to-many systems. RSS is an implementation of a hierarchical authority structure, oh boy I just need more of that like I need more spam.
Ya know, I remember in the early days when there was no WWW, and listservs were considered a killer app. It's no different today, many people want an internet connection just to access and interact on specialized lists. Let us hope that this never goes away. The internet is not designed for us to all subscribe to the same RSS feeds, the internet is designed for us to talk to EACH OTHER.