billso.com

I’ve said it before in 2004 and 2006: email is broken. It’s a great rant topic for my 1200th blog post.

The credibility of email as a marketing medium was destroyed years ago by UCE (unsolicited commercial email or spam). Managers helped destroy email as a business tool shortly afterwards.

Students often treat email as a casual messaging tool, when college is a great opportunity to learn how to use email in an effective and professional manner. Every email user can learn to write better messages.

Help me read your email

It really helps me if the subject fields are meaningful. I get hundreds of email messages every day.

Tell me what class you’re taking. I don’t carry my class roster with me 24/7. I’ve had students email me questions about their assignment without ever mentioning which course they are taking. It’s more of a problem at the start of the term. After the first 2 or 3 weeks, I’ll remember which students are in which course.

Do you need an answer to a question? Then summarize the question in the subject line. If it’s an easy question, I can send a quick reply with my answer. If an answer will take me more time, I’ll send a reply saying so.

Are you asking me to do something for you on a deadline? Put the date in the subject line.

No fancy email

Email is a great tool for written communication, as long as the message is written in plaintext. When I get HTML-formatted email that has pretty backgrounds and fancy fonts - assuming that the message made it past my servers’ spam blockers - my reply is almost always in plaintext.

HTML is for web pages, not mail messages. The writer’s color choices might look nice to them, but these colors might render the email unreadable to a color-blind recipient.

It’s far too easy to hide web bugs and bogus code in an HTML-formatted email message. Some mobile email clients like Gmail will strip the HTML formatting before displaying the message.

I hate “reply all”

I often receive email messages from other faculty members, and the cc: and to: fields are littered with addresses. I love my colleagues, but some of them never really learned how to use the Internet or email.

Some email servers block messages with large numbers of outbound email addresses, as a courtesy to the potential recipients. If one of the recipients presses the “reply all” button, their message gets sent to the entire list. It gets annoying when their reply is something innocuous like “OK” or “I’ll be there”.

Get with the program

Most people who are sending one email message to more than 20 people should consider posting the content to a web page, an intranet, or an RSS feed.

Granted, I do use the mass email function in TurnItIn.com to remind students about assignment deadlines, or to announce a new assignment. I almost always make these announcements on billso.com, but experience has taught me that some students cannot access the web site on a regular basis.

I’m could go off on a rant, but most of my students do use email effectively. These articles from about.com and Microsoft have some great tips for those who are interested.

I have a few readers who follow billso.com on their iPhones. I know this because i check my server logs on a regular basis. So I have two goodies for my readers who use iPhones.

UPDATE: The first link in the next paragraph won’t resolve properly if viewed on an iPhone. iPhone users can type the following link into their browser:

http://snurl.com/2477v

This link generates an iPhone application that displays the most recent posts to billso.com. Thanks to the fine folks at iPhoneAtlas for the tip!

iPhone users can follow this link to build an iPhone application for any RSS feed. This may also work with the iPod Touch.

The second goodie is a feature I added on 29 January 2008. Use Safari to view billso.com, bookmark the site, then add the new bookmark to the iPhone home screen as a webclip. The billso.com logo appears as the webclip icon!

This page from PixelBox has a quick tutorial for those who want to add this feature to their own web sites, and this article by Cameron Hunt has an extra hack that adds a webclip bookmarklet to iPhones.

All of my iPhone related posts can be viewed through this tag link.

As a reminder, I don’t own an iPod or an iPhone… yet. I’m waiting for the 2nd generation iPhone, which will have 3G features. Both BusinessWeek and the New York Times have run articles this week indicating that a new model is coming this summer. Apple has limited inventories of current iPhones in the US.

Good thing, since Samsung and Nokia are releasing their own high-end smartphones, according to this New York Times article. Consumers are driving these changes, after years of taking whatever phones carriers would get from the handset manufacturers. Now the manufacturers are scurrying to design and deliver mobile phones that rival minicomputers, while the telecom carriers rush to open their networks.

If you do not use RSS to read billso.com, you can ignore this message!

For my readers who use RSS, I apologize. It looks like all four of the RSS feeds for billso.com went down earlier today.

I’m working on the problem. The default feed seems to be the culprit.

In the meantime, please check the web site for new articles.

Updated 13 March 2008, 0640 HT: I’ve fixed the problem, but I had to remove the 6100 and 7010 feeds in the process.

The 6100 and 7010 feeds are being redirected to the main feed at http://rss.billso.com/billsocom so please resubscribe to that feed!

I’m spending some time this week importing some of the better articles from my old blogs. Before I installed WordPress here on billso.com in January 2007, I used Bloglines.com.

The blogging tools that Bloglines provided left a lot to be desired, however. In fact, that user interface hasn’t changed very much in the last 2 years. It is very difficult to export these old articles to other systems.

My old articles were posted to Bloglines during 2005 and 2006, and I’m tired of supporting links to a legacy system. But I didn’t want to lose my articles from the October 2006 earthquake.

I am keeping the time-date stamps for these old articles, and I am adding an imported category to my content management system (CMS) here at billso.com. Each of these old articles includes a link to the original Bloglines URL, so that Google and other search engines can find the new locations.

If anyone’s reading my RSS feed with Outlook 2007, please let me know.