It has been a long while since I have taken the time to blog anything. To be honest since I have discovered Facebook and Twiter I have done very little other social networking or blogging. I am really enjoying meeting and keeping up with friends and family on Facebook and Twiter and really wish more of my friends and family were on these sites (hint). That is, at least in part, why I am writing this post.
I can remember a time not so long ago when email was my main way of keeping up with distant friends and family. When I first started using email in the mid to late 90′s I found it to be a great way to stay in touch and to give and receive useful information. As time has gone by email has for me lost some of it’s appeal mainly because I get so much of it and unfortunately 80%-90% of it is not useful information. You all know what I am talking about. It can be summed up in one big ugly word SPAM!
Spam in and of it’s self is bad enough when it is from someone you don’t know. Because it tends to clutter up your inbox and slow down your attempt to get to the really important stuff. Over the years I have developed a callous on my delete key finger from all that spam. But thank God that for the most part I have got it under control. Most of it never even makes it to my inbox any more. But what do you do when the spam is from your friends or family? Well I can tell you what I used to do, I used to try to read it all out of a guilty and twisted sense that I owed it to the sender to read what they had sent me. But that just left me tired and disappointed most of the time. I then moved to the next stage of handling spam from known sources and that was to tell the spammer to quit spamming me or else! Well I said it nicer than that and most of them got the message, but still a few persist.
What gets me is that some of these folks don’t have anything better to do than to read the spam that they get and then forward it on to me which I get only because the sender is in my address book and is a trusted sender. So in effect it is like I don’t have a spam filter at all. I mean come on, are some of my friends and family getting paid to send me spam, cause that it what it feels like sometimes. What is slightly less annoying is those who read something that they deem as Earth shattering or life changing for them and then feel compelled to send it to almost every one in their address book. Not that some of this is bad or not interesting but do they ever think that there might be a better way of sharing without filling up the inboxes of everyone they know. I hate to call this spamming but I don’t have another term that comes close to telling you how this makes me feel.
Well now that I have made some of you mad because I am not sensitive to your way of thinking let me take it a step further. GET A BLOG. After all I would not want to point out a problem without giving a solution. Welcome to what has become one of the hottest ways to communicate with large groups of people in the last ten years. I would suggest that if you have some tasty nuggets that you just can’t keep to yourself that you start a personal blog and then invite your contact list to see it. In this way folks can pick and choose if they want to read your latest revelation or pass. If you do this I cannot promise you that everyone will read what you have to say, but what I can tell you is that those who are interested will. As a added bonus you may actually gain some new friends (and or enemies) from the world wide web. Either way your friends and family will appreciate it and you will no longer have to wonder if they are reading what you send via email any longer or just trashing it all like I do. You will be doing your part to bring peace to unknown numbers of email inboxes.
For more on how to avoide spamming people by email or if you just want a good set of rulles to follow when thinking that you just have to send that email click here to to to Seth’s Blog and an atricle he wrote called “How to send a personal email“. How did I hear about Seth? I found his blog in Google Reader. The “How to send a personal email” blog post was sharred with me by a friend on Google Reader. If you don’t have a Google Reader account yet I would suggest you get one. This is yet another great way to share items with out cluttering up someones inbox.
