Earlier, I posted with a fairly abrasive title, suggesting that a newsletter about blawgging that is available only by email struck me as odd. The newsletter publisher, Sheryl Sisk Schelin, of blawg The Inspired Solo, posted some thoughtful responses as comments on the original.

I bring this back up largely to address the thought more completely.

The title of the post was, "How to convince me you don't get it." (emphasis added.) I completely understand her points. Chunks of my day job have been spent proselytizing on the benefits of syndication and "Web 2.0." Other chunks of my day job have been spent wedging email notifications into products where moderately flexible feed notifications exist. I understand that it's a small community that truly gets feeds.

That it's a small community that gets it is precisely why I feel that those pushing blogs (and blawgs) should be utilizing the technologies to their utmost. That readers may not all use feed readers or even understand what that means, however, doesn't diminish the importance of using feeds for publishing. It makes it more important!

There are tools, such as Feedburner Email, to allow the recalcitrant users to subscribe to feed-based publications via email. There are tools in most publishing platforms to do the same. It's certainly possible to publish by feed and allow subscriptions via email, all without the user knowing what's going on at all. But more importantly, surely part of that publication will be education, and what better way to educate a user about the feed than to give examples of the the precise content they're looking at as a feed?

Obviously, publishers may publish however they want. However, in my opinion, if one truly gets and values syndications and feeds, it only makes sense to publish everything appropriate via feed and to make allowances for others when needs arise.

Essentially you are pushing for a standard format for syndication (which atom/rss are, or have become in the blog-ish world). This is sensible, of course. I think that if, in the original case, the 'get this via email!' comes from the rss-syndication that's still in your ballpark of 'getting it' even though the magic behind the scenes to get rss -> email isn't visible to you, right?

Nice point though, I do agree that some standard format for syndication/publication of material is good... we push for this at work often and often get pushback from people :( oh well it is a phone company :(

-Chris

Yes, exactly. If someone wants to get feed-syndicated content mailed to them via a gateway, I have no problem with that. I have no problem offering such an option.

Heck, I don't even mind too much if people want to continue to have emailed newsletters, even if I find the idea antiquated. There's lots of infrastructure there. (I did recently push through passing up Mailman in favor of Sympa at work, which has feed capabilities built-in -- among other benefits for our environment.)