Common Craft Blog
Business Blogs Vs. Email Newsletters
By leelefever on February 14, 2004 - 4:07pm
I thought this was an easy to understand post that comparesBusiness Blogs to Email Newsletters.
I think the Wayne Hulbert makes good points, but I also think that weblogs are not a replacement for email newsletters. This is because of the way that email newsletters push information to inboxes. The expectation is different for the reader (something coming to me vs. me having to go to something).
To truly compare weblogs to email newsletters, you'd need to consider the role of RSS in pushing weblog posts out to subscribers. Much like someone would subscribe by email, people in the future will subscribe via RSS.
In my mind this is because people are lazy. OK, maybe not lazy- but many will not be proactive in seeking out information- but if it comes to them, it's more useful.
In looking at the push abilities of RSS, I do believe that weblogs can be seen as a replacement for email newsletters.
Oh, and... Happy Valentine's Day!
:)
Business Blogs Vs. Email Newsletters
You wrote: "people in the future will subscribe via RSS."
You don't have to wait for the future... Come take a look at the service we provide at http://weblogs.pubsub.com/. We monitor over 1.1 million weblogs in realtime and allow people to create persistent queries or subscriptions that select from all the blog updates just those they are interested in. Items that match a users subscription are then inserted into a custom RSS feed for them.
Using a system like this, you can decide that you want to see all items that contain references to some specific subject and then our real-time matching engine will build you precisely the feed you are looking for. Similarly, a business can create a new blog entry and know that everyone who has a subscription to some keywords in that entry is going to see it in their personal feeds.
This is called "content-based" publish and subscribe. i.e. Your subscription selects items based on their content, not who wrote them or where they were published.
Come to http://pubsub.com/ and give it a try!
bob wyman
Business Blogs Vs. Email Newsletters
I have to agree. I listed a few reasons why at www.metamarketing.org.
Weblogs and XML syndication will replace newsletters. Businesses are trying to learn how best to use an external blog as a customer retention tool. As soon as a few good examples are established and bugs worked out, you'll see more and more orange XML buttons decorating the web. Stay tuned.