Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Steven Cohen has another article going over his dislike of email, and quoting a Business Week article for support. I'm not sure I agree with the original article: people receiving 250 emails, only 15% of them relevant? 60% of email being spam? I get precisely zero spam in my work email account. I also get hundreds of emails, and way more than 15% of them are relevant - even though most of my emails are either off mailing lists or part of a current awareness service. If someone's getting hundreds of irrelevant emails per day, there's something wrong with their organisation's internal practices - or they have some very annoying external contacts. The Business Week article does suggest some alternatives - blogs, wikis, RSS, instant messenging. These certainly have potential uses, but I still don't think email is dead. We use it for internal and external communication that just wouldn't work over IM - we need to be able to express involved and complicated ideas, and we need an audit trail to show what decisions were made.

Techdirt says that email won't be dying any time soon.

| posted by Simon at 9:07 pm