Statistics Foul, Mr. Crawford
February 16th, 2005If there is one thing that I am reading more about at the DEMO@15! conference and the new tools that are being displayed, it’s that people are just fed up with e-mail. For example, take the people from Jot, a company that has rocked my wiki world (thanks to Andrea). From an article titled, New Tools Making Online Work Easier:
“Kraus became a believer in Wikis after he and fellow co-founder Graham Spencer got fed up with exchanging hundreds of e-mails and attachments and tried using a Wiki instead while working on a business plan.”
Longtime LS friend Chris Pirillo also gets in on the act. He’s quoted in this article from IMedia Connection:
“With an animated tone and a hyperbolic stage-pace, Pirillo called out his indictments of email’s lost effectiveness.”
“Filters are killing 25 percent of legitimate (email) deliveries,” Pirillo pointed out. He was referring, of course, to the practice many business users have of setting spam filters so high, that even potentially lucrative emails (such as legitimate inquiries from prospective customers) are grabbed by spam filters and never reach their intended recipients.”
“As a result of these ramped up spam filters, Pirillo noted that he sees email as an “increasingly polluted channel” in which emails from unknown parties arrive at the server with a filter-ordained, “guilty before proven innocent” presumption. Because of this, “conversion rates are decreasing, blacklists continue to grow, and we have to pay for whitelisting services,” he added.”
I’m starting to get really excited about the future (or lack thereof) of e-mail. It’s getting harder and harder to justify e-mail these days. Take, for example, a post from Walt Crawford’s webl…journal:
“I posted the “soft trial” piece here on Monday morning, reaching people directly and via RSS. Five people have commented in two days.”
“I posted a similar piece on the C&I Update blog on Tuesday,presumably reaching people mostly via RSS. One person has commented in one day.”
“I posted a much shorter piece on the Topica mailing list last night, reaching people via email. So far, 18 people have commented in 12 hours.”
“I already had a Perspective written on “conversation” and various internet tools (and claims as to how they support). This datapoint will probably modify that Perspective slightly.”
He immediately gets called on his flawed method by cavlec:
“One, what are the numbers? I didn’t even know you HAD this blog until another library-blogger mentioned it, and I’m one of your biggest fans.
Two, what’s the time spread? How long have you had this blog? The mailing list? Audiences develop over time.”
That’s exactly what I thought when I read Walt’s initial post. “Foul”, I cried out to the empty room at home (my family having fallen asleep). Walt’s e-mail list has been around for as long as C&I has been available. I was one of the original e-mail recipients of his newsletter (I never discontinued my subscription and since I don’t have that e-mail address anymore, I would assume that I have been deleted - or it just bounces every month). Since the e-mail list has been around much longer than his announcement feed and his webl…journal, of course he will get more responses from his e-mail list.
If Walt had set up an RSS feed and the e-mail list for his newsletter when it started, then we could compare the two. In this case, however, it’s apples and oranges. Can’t compare them. Uh uh.
Now, before I get hammered, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t provide e-mail alerts/mailing lists for our users. I know the statistics about how many people use RSS (not alot at this point - but growing), but that doesn’t mean that I can’t push RSS more than e-mail. I can say RSS is better (it is) and also agree to use e-mail until RSS becomes more mainstream (it will).
What I can also say is what I’ve said before on many occasions. The reason why I tout RSS for content delivery is because I know that it will be used more than e-mail in the future and I want my fellow librarians to be ready for the surge. Don’t be fooled into thinking that e-mail will survive the next 5 to 10 years and then smack yourself in the forehead because you haven’t been pushing content via RSS and missed the boat.
Love ya Walt.