I am on a mailing list of people interested in using technology for not for profits. On this mailing list a discussion erupted concerning when to post to the mailing list, when to put information on a blog and whether it is appropriate to post some of the information on the mailing list with a pointer back to the blog for a more detailed discussion.

I think the emails going back and forth bring us back to an important underlying concept. Whatever you write, think about the goals you have is what you are sending out and question whether the content and the medium effectively serve these goals.

One of the first questions is if you want to be pushing your material out to a possible reader, or waiting for a reader to pull your message. There are times that either are good. Personally, I like to push out messages via email if I have an important, time sensitive alert, but for material that people can read at their leisure, I like to put it up on a website for people to come visit when they have time to stop and think.

Another question is how much is the material a broadcast where you want to get the message out to a lot of people and don’t expect a discussion and how much do you want to encourage dialogue or multilogue. It seems to me as if short discussions are best handled via email but much more complicated multi-threaded discussions are often better handled via forum software. (MHO, YMMV)

This can get complicated when you look at mailing lists that many people subscribe to in a digest mode. As an example, with the mailing list in question, I receive it in digest mode. The message I received had eighteen messages sent over a twelve-hour period all bundled into a single message. As such, I scan the emails quickly and see if there is anything that I want to follow up on. If there is, I like to have links to more in depth discussions, and if it is a topic I’m not especially interested in, I’m glad when a summary is posted to the list and a link is provided. That way, I don’t have to scan over a large amount of text that I’m not interested in.

That said, the same sort of thing relates to blog entries. Many people read the first paragraph of a blog entry and then decide if they want to delve deeper. Making a large portion of the blog entry fall beneath the fold in a ‘Read more’ section, enables visitors to find the content that they are interested in, read that in detail and skip over the parts they aren’t interested in.

One final comment: Tone is also very important. To me, some of the emails on the list came across with a ‘If you don’t play my way, I’m leaving’ sort of tone. Personally, I hear enough of that from my three year old, so when I start reading things with that sort of tone, I tend to take the writer less seriously.

The Internet has opened up many great new ways for people to get their message out. Sometimes it makes sense to use mailing lists, sometimes blogs, sometimes forums, sometimes chat rooms. We need to think carefully about the message we are sending out and chose the medium, the style and the tone that most effectively gets our message across.

My two cents,
Aldon

P.S. I am posting this as a blog entry. On the mailing list I am sending a summary as follows.

I think the discussion about when to send emails, when to post to a blog and when to link an email to a blog is extremely important. It all comes down to how to most effectively get your message out.

Personally, I believe that it is best to send short emails to get peoples attention, including a nice summary, and point to a website if there a longer discussion. If you are interested in a longer discussion about this, including issues of push-pull, digests, tone, etc., please read my blog, http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/view/248