Blogs By Email

I was writing yesterday that a lot of users don't have enough blogs yet to keep track of to make RSS aggregators a useful technology for them to invest time in. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of blogs, just that most internet users haven't identified ones that they like yet.

Well, Charles Jolley recommends RSSFWD today -

"Every blog should use Rssfwd on their site also. Most of your readers don’t understand blogs and they definitely don’t do RSS. But you can make your blog do double time by reaching these folks too with e-mail."

I think this is going to be useful for people as a kind of stepping stone to RSS aggregators. (Charles Jolley, by the way, is part of a trio of guys who've relocated from San Diego to Prague for a year to develop their e-mail software. That's pretty cool and I reckon he knows a thing or two about e-mail.)

A lot of the people I want to reach aren't going to be using an RSS aggregator for another five years, so RSSFWD is a good way for them to get new blog posts. RSSFWD is a terrible name though - it's a service for people who don't know and don't care what RSS is - so it might more usefully be called something like BlogsByEmail.com or something like that.

They've got an interesting implementation too - you'll see the new link on the top right hand corner of this page - Get new posts by email - the link is the same no matter which blog the link is on - it doesn't have the blog name as a query parameter as I'd expect it to. That's going to give that particular page a lot of Google juice as more people add the service.

Posted by Alexander at October 5, 2005 06:40 PM

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