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Date sent: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 12:13:48 +0530 (IST)
From: Frederick Noronha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [GKD] E-mail Can Indeed Be a Powerful Tool
Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
E-MAIL CAN INDEED BE A POWERFUL TOOL
By Frederick Noronha
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
My own discovery of the power of 'e-mail publishing' was quite
accidental. It wasn't even called that then, and we didn't know what
it was leading to. But over the years, one's conviction that e-mail
and e-mail publishing is much, much more powerful than the snazziest
of websites has stood the test of time.
But, can I hear you asking, if e-mail publishing is all that potent,
why don't we hear of it? The dotcom boom came and went. But even
after the bust, we still continue using the humble e-mail like the
proverbial pinch of salt. We take it for granted, and only realise
what we miss when we lose access to it.
If you want to understand this issue deeper, do check out 'Poor
Richard's Email Publishing'. This book comes with a long sub-title
that explains a great deal. It's about: Creating Newsletters,
Bulletins, Discussion Groups and Other Powerful Communication Tools.
Authored by Chris Pirillo, this title comes from Top Floor
Publishing, and is published from Colorado in the US. (Price $29.95,
ISBN 0-9661032-5-4, 334 pages.)
You can't deny that e-mail publishing, in a region like South Asia,
is virtually non-existent.... or at best in its infancy. For that
matter, how many e-zines, newsletters, discussion lists or mailing-
lists do you know of which work effectively? Both in terms of the
numbers they serve, and the regularity with which these work? It is
only some news- services (the Indnet network, Vani Murarka's
discussion-group Interact-Inn, a network of health professionals
CyberMed-India, ZDNetIndia, Osama Manzar's INOMY from New Delhi and a
few others) that come out faithfully.
But there are useful and honorable exceptions.
On the IT front, Pakistan has Irfan Khan's excellent
[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list, that gives one a useful update of
what's happening on the regional IT front. SAJA, the South Asian
Journalists Association, runs its useful mailing-lists, a labour of
love for Prof Sree and his team at Columbia University. Hersh Kapoor,
an expat India and one of the (seemingly shrinking minority)
continuing to long for peace on the subcontinent, brings out a useful
Alternative India Index <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> from France. This offers a
chance for Indians and Pakistanis to learn of less-hawkish
perspectives from each other's countries, and build sustainable
possibilities of a more tolerant subcontinent which tries to at least
begin understanding 'the other side'.
Some mailing-lists -- also somewhat mistakenly called Listservs after
the software they're based on, or more-inaccurately e-groups (after
the earlier name of a site allowing to set up free lists, now
yahoogroups.com) -- focus on South Asian-related themes. But, often,
these lists fall into disuse. There's simply nobody to post regularly
to them. Many lack the 'critical mass' in terms of membership
numbers. We here simply haven't seem to have yet realised the utility
of building up such 'communities of interest'.
Is it because websites exude more glamour? Or was it due to the fact
that everyone thought of making a killing on a website? Undeniably,
making money from e-mail publishing appears much more remote now than
it did earlier on....
Never mind that. Since sometime in 1995 this writer accidentally
stumbled across a mailing list of Goan expats based in the US. (Goa
is a small region on the Indian west coast, and has a significant
segment of its population migrating outside... a legacy since
Portuguese colonial times.) It was the initiative of Herman Carneiro
of the North Eastern University, Boston, who was then all of 18 years
old.
Educational institutions in the US were then encouraging their
students to set up mailing-lists on just about any subject. Carneiro
chose Goa, a tiny region on the Indian west coast, which his
ancestors hail from but which his family hasn't been living in for
two or more generations.
This list started as a network for young Goans to keep in touch with
one another, exchange light banter and generally meet up. Till, that
was, others like a librarian based in the UK, a scientist back in
Goa, and we journos were struck by the potential of a network to
exchange more-serious news and views, undertake initiatives related
to Goa, and play an otherwise more useful role.
GoaNet is today 4000 members strong (quite a size for a state with
just 1.35 million inhabitants) and has plans to grow further. It has
been behind various campaigns: to get Internet connectivity to the
small region of Goa faster, to build awareness about the dangers of
paedophilia in this tourist-region, and to push plans that would give
local students a chance to get faster access to computer education in
schools.
The power of email publishing is all but clear.
Not just that, Carneiro's experiment inspired us to start similar
mailing lists for environmental journalists, proponents pushing for
the legalising of community-radio in India, to link campaigners
working for wider literacy in India, promote GNU/Linux in Goa, and a
range of other subjects.
Author Chris Pirillo has been electronically publishing the
Lockergnome 'newsletter' via e-mail since late 1996. (This was the
time e-mail use began opening up globally; in India, only the
privileged few, who were part of the academic ERNET, or government
networks and some others had access to e-mail till August 1997, when
VSNL opened up its operations on Independence Day.) Pirillo's free
newsletter covers Microsoft's operating systems, the Internet, and
other technology tidbits.
E-mail's importance obviously cannot be overstated. Pirillo's message
is simple: steer off the hype (didn't the dotcoms go bust?). If there
is one thing you race to check at 3 am, it's your "homely,
unglamorous, ubiquitous" e-mail.
So, though there was never any media-blitz about the "e-mail
revolution", this is obviously a powerful tool if you harness it for
publishing. Pirillo urges you to start a e-mail newsletter. It puts
you in touch with people. it fulfills the basic human urge to
communicate. It satisfies an "addiction to cheap notoriety".
Newsletters, if done properly, are not spam!
>From then on, Pirillo goes to offer specific, useful tips on how to
make your e-mail communication work for you.
He starts with the basics: How does e-mail work? Why use e-mail? Can
e-mail and websites partner each other, to their mutual benefit? How
do you manage growing numbers of subscribers? Text or HTML
newsletters? What are the pitfalls of a discussion group? Does
'guerrilla promotion' work? Can you really make money from your
mailing list?
This thick tome has all the answers. It may be applied common-sense.
But the advice proffered is deeply thought of nonetheless.
To the end of the title are seven useful appendices. These guide the
reader through tips on service providers, and the mailing-list
software you need to install to run this (usually inexpensive)
business. There are also listings on e-mail commands used for mailing
lists and fifty "great e-mail publishing tips", among other things.
At the end of the day, Pirillo's belief that one can make money out
of e-zines is something one doesn't quite agree with. Maybe our
markets here are simply too small. Maybe one didn't try hard enough;
or perhaps the businessman hiding within this reviewer is not
sufficient evolved!
But discussion groups, mailing lists or ezines can be powerful tools
to build community, exchange ideas and help everyone involved gain in
the bargain. Maybe one should say 'nearly everyone'. There's a small
but determined minority who hates being "stressed out" by e-mail, and
considers almost everything to be spam. Those unlucky few will never
know what they're missing. Pirillo makes it possible for e-mail
publishers to up the value of their product.
This is not a book full of theories and principles; it offers very
practical suggestions that could be put to direct use.
What's the difference between e-mail newsletters, announcement lists,
bulletins/action alerts, moderated discussion lists, and unmoderated
discussion lists? There are subtle, but important, differences.
How does e-mail really work? What lends this medium of communication
"little glamour (but plenty of results)? Can e-mail and web sites be
considered "natural partners" and thus be used to promote each other?
There's all this and more in the book.
Some general e-mail related information is also included. For
instance, tips on how to configure a domain's e-mail account. There
are tips on subscription management, and why subscribers should be
able to leave the list whenever they want to.
There's also a section on different mailing lists software, Majordomo
(wasn't really designed to handle larger lists
efficiently), LISTSERV (meant expressly for the management of e-mail
communities) and Lyris (another major player, that
spoils you by its features). Even the humble Pegasus Mail software,
an e-mail client, can work for list owners with under
2,000 subscribers in their database. (As someone biased in favour of
GNU/Linux free softwares, one finds Mailman missing
from this list. Perhaps its popularity has zoomed only in recent
months, after this book was put together.)
Running mailing lists may seem simple. But there are many other
questions that come up: how frequently should one post, how
much should you be saying, what is the advantage of a text-based
newsletter? Can text-to-HTML converters help in turning
your newsletter into a Web page automatically?
Running a 'discussion group' is another cup of tea. Interacting with
list members needs tact and care. There's the law of
diminishing returns too (with 1000 members on your list, you
sometimes can't expect more than 10 responses! Even if you
have 10,000 people in your discussion group, not everybody is going
to post, and not everybody wants dozens of messages
streaming into him or her Inbox on a regular basis.)
Pirillo also offers specific tips on how to promote your newsletters
and discussion lists. Some tips: build subscribers
("your great resource... without them you're nothing"), get peer
endorsements, post-boasts, linking up for cross-
promotions, designing a logo, off-line offensives and many more
(promotion via business cards, swap content with other
ezines).
One of his interesting sections is the "publisher's stories", which
narrates the experiences of successful e-mail
publishing pioneers.
Over fifty pages of the book go to tell us the experiences of various
e-publishers. You come across the stories of
publishers of newsletters named 'The Naked PC Newsletter', 'Poor
Richard's Web Site News' and others.
Expectedly, these are mostly US-based experiences. Some of the names
could be familiar with old-timers on the Net,
specially those fascinated by the potential of e-mail. (This,
incidentally, seems to be a stage we in India seems to have
skipped over. The Internet arrived here somewhat late in the day,
after 1997. Since then we got fascinated with the dotcoms
and websites and latter technology even before realising how useful e-
mail and e-mail publishing really can be.)
Some useful insights: Randy Cassingham of the "This is True" online
newsletter points out a successful newsletter could
reach 10,000 people via e-mail, at a cost cheaper than what it would
be to send it out to fewer than 100 on paper! It's
when this realisation strikes that one realises the full potential. E-
mail carefully used, with skilled- enough writing and
content to match (not just carelessly strung together) can indeed be
a powerful tool.
--
Frederick Noronha * Freelance Journalist * Goa * India
BYTESFORALL www.bytesforall.org
GOAPIX www.goacom.com/wallpapers/
GOARESEARCH www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/1503
NEWS www.goacom.com/news/
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