Why blogs are better (funnier) than email

I know, I know... There are hundreds of reasons why, and a lot of people would completely disagree with that statement.

But today I realized one big reason: choice.

Many people send funny jokes and pictures around the office and friends. You know - a long joke, or a funny picture, or in the extreme cases, a 3.5 Megabyte Powerpoint (with pictures) or a Quicktime movie file.

I hate it. On some of my email accounts, I have a mail quota - and I hit it really fast if I'm away a week. If I printed and burned all the Powerpoint slideshows I get, I could comfortably warm my house through the winter. I also read my mail quite often through GPRS (40 kbps or less), and I really, really don't like it when a "fun" movie clogs the connection for several minutes.

On the other hand, I have no problems whatsoever with people who post fun things on their blogs. The difference? Choice.

I get to choose whether I want to see that "fun" thing or not. Sometimes I don't have the time, or I don't have the equipment, or I just can't be bothered. With email it just comes to your inbox, and you cannot do a damned thing about it. Anyone can send me email, even the people with a bad sense of humour. (Not that I know any) You have to react to email, even if it's just deleting the message without reading. If someone, however, posts a link to their blog, I can read the description, bookmark it and come back to the message later on. Bloglines allows me to save blog entries easily for later viewing - which is highly useful and does not clutter my Bookmarks bar.

Blogs are a far better way of spreading memes than email, because they reach fertile ground quicker. Email depends too much on people forwarding your "funny" thing to others - blogs are visible to all people (and Google). Therefore, blogs will eventually surpass email as the preferred communication medium for non-personal items. I think :)



Comments

Janne - i want to vote +1 for this blog entry, but fail due to the lack of a vote button.

--imario, 02-Sep-2004

Now if you could get people to send the permlink to the entry instead of cutting and pasting the entire article into the e-mail.

--Foster, 02-Sep-2004

Actually, there used to be a voting service for RSS readers only :). But I removed it due to some stupid spambots doing annoying things with them.

But thanks for your kind words, imario!

--JanneJalkanen, 02-Sep-2004


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"Main_blogentry_020904_1" last changed on 02-Sep-2004 13:45:44 EEST by JanneJalkanen.