Accept no substitutes

Month: October 2011

#noemail in US News & World Report Inside Education

US News Best Colleges

Menachen Wecker’s article “5 Tips for Managing Your Campus E-mail: Students can use a variety of techniques, including filtering, creating folders, and flagging spam” begins:

If you E-mail Paul Jones, you will receive an auto-response explaining why the journalism professor at University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill (UNC) quit using E-mail on June 1, 2011—and why there must be a better way to communicate.

In a phone interview, Jones says he stopped E-mailing because his inbox was clogged by computer-generated spam.

“When I started using E-mail 25 years ago, I sent mail to people, and people sent mail to me,” he says. “Now Amazon sends me mail telling me I just ordered a book. I know I just ordered a book, you idiot, I still have the browser open!”

Some recent research suggests that college students may increasingly share Jones’s view of E-mail as “a complete time sink.” A 2010 Pew Internet report finds that 11 percent of 12-to-17-year-olds exchange daily E-mails with friends, and 54 percent text message daily. A white paper released in early 2011 by the Internet marketing research company, comScore, charts a 59 percent decline in E-mail use by 12-to-17-year-olds in 2010.

But according to the recently released National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, which surveyed 3,000 students at 1,179 colleges and universities, 39 percent of respondents wish their professors used E-mail more often, and 75 percent send or receive an average of 25 E-mails a day.

In the course of the article, I offer more advice about managing email in college including: Don’t use it, Let others read it instead, and Unsubscribe from every listserv that you can possibly unsubscribe to. Read. Enjoy. Learn. Do.

Social uber email in Business by Carolyn, Luis, Luis, and Louis – 3 stories of #noemail

Private social networks playing Facebook role in more workplaces (Carolyn Duffy Marsan. Network World, October 20, 2011)

In the last 18 months, hundreds of thousands of companies have signed up for private cloud-based social networking services such as Yammer, Chatter, Huddle and Jive — all of which are modeled after Facebook.

Today, millions of U.S. workers are using these social networking services on the job instead of e-mail, Intranet sites, wikis, blogs or other collaboration software. CIOs are reporting significant returns on their investments in these services, which cost $5 or less per user, per month.

“Social networking is really powerful because it allows people to have real conversations with each other, and it’s unfiltered,” says Chris Laping, CIO of the Denver-based Red Robin Gourmet Burger chain and a Yammer user. “It’s a great way for me to get a pulse check on the topics that people are talking about in the regions, whether it’s labor costs or food costs. …There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t see some conversation on Yammer that I don’t think: ‘Wow, that’s interesting.'”

Email Driving Your Business Crazy? Dump It and Embrace Social Software! (Socialize Me. Luis Benitez. October 20, 2011)

A lot of my colleagues express amusement when I tell them that I’ve been able to reduce my inbox from 100+ emails/day to ~20 emails/day. The first question they always ask is: “How did you do it?”

It wasn’t easy and it has taken time, but I was motivated by Luis Suarez. Luis was was interviewed by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur in their Net@Night show last year and is living the dream: a world without email. It was one of Luis’ webinars that introduced me to the concept of moving away from email and embracing social software.

Luis Benitez includes a SlideShare from IBM’s Louis Richardson:

Benitez also includes this terse but useful summary of Richardson’s presentation:

Richardson summarizes why a business should embrace social software over email:

Open the conversation, leverage the wisdom of the crowds
Use networks and communities to target the conversation
Easily capture intellectual capital and avoid re-inventing the wheel
And most of all: It’s Easy. Low Impact. High Value!

#noemail at #UNC Carolina Technology Consultants Retreat

Carolina Technology Consultants

What: The Logic and Destiny of #noemail
When: Thursday, October 20 11:30 AM – 12:15 PM
Where: Student Union Room 3205, UNC
Who: Carolina Technology Consultants

Prezi: Here Now with The Who doing the Kids Are Alright or as http://tinyurl.com/noemail-uncctc

Description:

Nearly 30 years ago Paul Jones began working on unified messaging systems leading from Call-OS, USENET, WYLBUR, TSO, BITNET, DARPA, ARPA to modern (for its time) SMTP mail. That was then, and this is now. Email has become a zombie that doesn’t realize that it’s dead and falling apart, a vampire that sucks your life’s blood away slowly each night. You’ve probably noticed this yourself.

Jones has put email behind him. In an attempt to atone for his part for inflicting email on UNC, he is exploring alternatives to email with a shotgun and a wooden stake (and Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) as his tools.

40 Years of email meets 11/11/11 #NoEmail Day

No Email Day - 11/11/11 - #noemail

Martin Bryant, writing at The Next Web (insider), covers the 40 years of email from the first email sent by MIT graduate Ray Tomlinson who was working at research and development firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman to the pending end of email and the coming of #noemail. Yes, Tomlinson confesses that his very first mail was likely gibberish or what we now call spam, likely “‘QWERTY’ or another string of characters”.

Spam continues to be part of the email life, if you can call that life. “Pingdom claims that 262 billion spam messages were sent daily in 2010, that’s 89.1% of all emails sent.” (emphasis added).

But the nail in the email coffin isn’t spam, but a changing culture that requires something better, faster, more personal, more mobile, more like IM, Messenger, GTalk, Facebook, and/or Google+. ” A ComScore study on 2010 digital trends in the US found that Web email usage saw an 8% year-on-year decline in 2010 overall, with a 59% decline in use among people aged between 12-17.” (again I add emphasis).

Perhaps with that change in mind, Paul Lancaster of Plan Digital UK has declared 11/11/11 as No Email Day. Join me in joining his Facebook group/page and by letting email alone on that special day. You’ll be glad you did.

Paul Lancaster respects email and sees it as vital. I don’t endorse that view, but I do endorse 11/11/11 as #NoEMail Day.

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