Flashes of Panic

I’m becoming a passionate supporter of web feeds (RSS and/or Atom) in place of broadcast e-mail lists.

One of our authors has been running a broadcast list for several years. His previous list host closed him down last week (he had been a visiting professor there, and has returned to his home institution) so he moved the list to our server.

This morning I found close to 100 bounce messages in my inbox, and so far this morning I have spent most of my work time reading the bounces and removing the (presumably bad) addresses from the list.

Why centralize that garbage? Let’s give them a feed and let them subscribe and unsubscribe when they want to. We can even let them slice and dice which categories of the list content they want feeds of. Everyone wins: the list maintainer has less work to do. I have less work to do. And the users have more options.

Well, those users who understand what a feed is and how to subscribe to one, that is.

Now Playing: Seagull from Nowhere by Ride