blogs and listservs

been a bit of a theme this week what with being blocked due to too high a volume of posts and then having my test blog pinged for being a spam blog due to its repetitive nature (which of course is what happens on listservs when people reply to messages and include the preceding messages in a thread). Anyway the test blog is gone now.

It's also been a very useful exercise. Always good to experiment rather than just speculate.

I think I've proved to my own satisfaction that pushing the contents of low volume lists out to rss feeds is a valid way of getting information across

1. Human Factors: depending on the blog aggregator used the occasional appearanace of a low volume blog is more likely to be read than an adminsitrative email that can be lost in a slew of other messages
2. Ease of distribution: other than getting people to actively subscribe to the feed there is very little administrative overhead - certainly far less than in managing a traditional listserv
3. Lurkers: this mechanism peple who wish to lurk, or who only wish to follow do so, again without an adminsitrative overhead

While my experiment of sending out interesting links via twitter is also valid, the 140 character limit is a bit of a limitation, an having people click on a link to get the whole truth is a bit less in the face than is perhaps desirable for outage notices and the like. That said, sending out alerts any and every way possible is probably a good thing ...