>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: bill(_at_)getactive(_dot_)com
w: http://getactive.com
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