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

2003-11-30 13:14:31
>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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