

1120 Subscribers in 2 Days: My Foray into E-mail Newsletters - briandoll
http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-my-foray-into-e-mail-newsletters.html

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steveklabnik
I'm one of those subscribers, and the first issue was great. I always seem to
let my RSS feeds go, but I read all the emails that hit my inbox...

If I subscribed to more newsletters, I imagine that it'd end up being the
same, though.

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petercooper
First, thanks! Second, I think you're right on your last point. But I think
there's a pyramid at play that means you won't keep more e-mail newsletters
than you can handle.

I only subscribe to a couple of real life magazines and newspapers - these
take up to an hour each to read. Below this, I subscribe to about 10-20 e-mail
newsletters I read frequently. Then about 100-150 RSS feeds. Then 800 people
on Twitter.. I'm _assuming_ other people are similar, but I could be wrong!

At each level of this pyramid, the content becomes more granular, river-like,
and easier to ignore. If RSS is overwhelming me, I "mark all as read" for that
day. With Twitter, I don't even bother "catching up," I just swim in the
current river of tweets when I have a spare minute..

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steveklabnik
No problem. I should have sent you an email about the Shoes 3 release on
Whyday; we were working up to the deadline and I kinda dropped the ball on the
PR front. But I'll be hitting you up for the 1.0 Hackety Hack release, that's
for sure.

I surely do the same thing you do for Twitter, but not everyone is like that.
People that follow a lot of people tweet repeat things because they understand
others treat Twitter like this, but then people who read it less get mad.

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petercooper
Yeah, I know quite a few people who attempt to "catch up" on Twitter every
day. These are, often, the same people who complain that they can't keep up
with 100+ feeds in Google Reader either (and are incredulous that some of us
maintain Inbox Zero :-)).

I think those people fear missing something. Mostly because I used to be in
that group. With age, though, I realized a) that almost nothing is _that_
important in the grand scale of life that it matters if I miss it, and b) if
something is important, it'll bubble through another way anyway.

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crazydiamond
Great first mail. I found i had missed some posts in my RSS feed.

