Accept no substitutes

Month: June 2011 (Page 2 of 2)

RSS toward #noemail whilst keeping Lists under control

Yesterday, I dug through the ancient Lyris documentation and translated the rather vague instructions on how to access RSS feeds for the various UNC lists that I subscribed to — before June 1, 2011.

Previously I had either let the list swamp my inbox where the messages were often skipped, deleted, or just lost and unread. For a few lists, I created folders and filter rules — which mostly worked okay — so that the messages were clear from my inbox but once again mostly unread or read too late or over-read as I had to check the folders more than I prolly really needed too.

Time sinkage and information untimeliness were the curse of the lists.

Now I subscribe my RSS reader — I’m rediscovering BlogLines, but there are plenty of others — and the lists are handled much better. In something close to a folder in concept but better presented easily to manage and in general better presented and better (I hope) dealt with.

Yes the items in the reader as articles are email postings, but for the most part they are really articles, School announcements, and the like that happened to be turned into mail messages as if by some evil force. RSS turns them back in to articles.

Now to get Mailman/Piperman archives to use RSS in a sensible way. Previous implementations that I’ve seen on the net so far are: 1) about 5 years old or greater 2) kludges that scrape the archives. Ideas on doing this in a better and more modern way would be greatly appreciated.

Other lists, many to which I subscribed many email identities ago, won’t even let me unsubscribe easily. There’s been too many years, too many passwords and too many email identities for me or the lists to understand who I was back when I started reading then ignoring the messages from those sources. Solution: Mark as spam.

For those asking, Gmail tells me that it makes about 150+ messages to me as spam daily.

Cracking #UNC Lyris RSS for #noemail

I finally posted this to Quora this afternoon:

As part of giving up email aka #noemail, I need to get off of a lot of email lists that are important to me.
I had, as you are about to suggest, used Gmail filters to send lists to various folders where I mostly ignored the postings unless something urgent was going on there.
But I am more diligent with my RSS reader and I can scan it more easily. I keep seeing old postings about getting RSS from various mailing list programs like Pipermail and Mailman, but they really seem dated and abandoned.
To make matters worse, several campus lists are on Lyris which doesn’t seem to have much to offer in alternative reading styles. It’s either in your inbox or through a difficult to use web archive page.

Then I started poking into the UNC Lyris documentation for help. After pointing me to an unusable URL form ( http://example.com/read/rss?forum=forumname&rev=0.92 don’t even bother), I found this bit which looked promising and with a little improvisation worked! I apologize for the UNC-centric-ness of this post, but I hope it will be useful to others here in Chapel Hill.

RSS Access

ListManager’s RSS function supports authentication and authorization. The same settings controlling access to the Discussion Forum Interface controls RSS access.

RSS will only be available if your list is set to keep archives. Without archives, no messages will be displayed.

If the list allows visitors, then non-members will be able to subscribe to the list’s RSS feed without actually subscribing to the list. If not, members will need to log in to proceed to the About page and get the RSS URL. The login information will then be included in the RSS URL on the About page, and will be formatted to include your email address and password (encrypted).

Only those IP addresses granted access to the Discussion Forum Interface in Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: Web: TCP/IP for Discussion Forum Interface will have access to the list via RSS.

ListManager will return messages from the past 14 days, up to one hundred messages.

Translation:

  1. Go to http://listserv.unc.edu
  2. Login using the mail address to which you used to subscribe to the lists that you would like RSS feeds from.
  3. Choose “My Forums” on the right side bar
  4. Choose the listname by clicking on it under “Forum Name”
  5. You’ll see recent messages to your chosen list (aka forum)
  6. Click on “About” on the right side bar
  7. The 3rd line should read “RSS Feed: RSS 0.92”
  8. “RSS 0.92” is a link! (but notice that RSS 2.0 is the current standard. Nonetheless 0.92 will work on most readers)
  9. Copy the Link
  10. Paste the link into your RSS reader of choice adding it as you would other links

“Sounds like an article in The Onion.” #noemail

I’m ending my first week without email aka #noemail. It’s been much less painful that I would have thought. I really appreciate that so many good people have been such good sports about trying other ways to contact me. Not that all have.

At least one person reported that he took time to decide whether to send me a link on twitter instead of email. It was a very helpful link to a paper by Shelly Farnham and Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! about Faceted Identities and communications styles online “Faceted identity, faceted lives: social and technical issues with being yourself online”.

Another shared my away message with his wife who responded, “Sounds like an article in The Onion.” It may sound like that but the articles so far have been at ReeseNews.org where we’ve passed over 2000 views and about 30 comments including my responses and a two parter at OpenSource.com where we’re up to 26 comments including my responses.

Let’s face it, Facebook — and Twitter and Google and whoever, some people just don’t want their communications to be owned by The Man. This passion for being unowned results in an over-estimate of email’s privacy and security. I say that is little of either in the case of email and much more of both in other services if that is seriously your concern. But this points to one of the four factors that influence communications choices — the psychological.

Occasionally, I run into a wannabe lawyer who explains that all email dealing with students, health, whatever must not leave a supposedly locked campus network. Of course it is a self-deluding fantasy to think that such a network could be created and sustained or that people would even use it as designed. But for a moment, let’s assume that you could eliminate all forwarding and copying and photographing and thumbdriving etc of email. Or that you could create a policy that an entire campus would faithfully follow to the letter. You can’t but if you could, then that would point to the second of the four factors that influence communications choice — policy.

I’ve also heard, on Facebook, that “I keep my friends and family on Facebook, my co-workers (I assume past and present) on LinkedIn, etc” or ” Somehow I end up with…” or “I’m on Diaspora, but no one else I talk with is there.” This is an expression of the third factor — the social.

Finally, there have been several people who just don’t want to add another service or to whom the technical barrier to entry is too much. “I’m happy with email; I don’t want to learn X. I tried by I never got it going.” or “X doesn’t let me do Y.” This is an expression of the fourth factor — the technical. The services don’t do what’s needed in an integrated way — Is there a decent alternative to Listserv? say — or they are inconvenient to join.

Some policy expressions are merely psychological excuses in drag. The same with technical complaints. People like to do what they are doing unless they are restless, curious and looking for change. Those restless ones are likely to be seen as potential subjects for Onion articles.

#noemail – Kindred Spirits and papers

#noemail has an international Facebook predecessor. We Quit Email has a lot of members and posters from .NL out of 175 members (or more properly Likers). There folks seem to be good spirits and like me interested in things that are faster and more social. They use the hastag #wqm

Founder Kim Spinder sounds a lot like me in this article:

Don't press send!

Don't press send!

Why #WQM?
First of all, e-mail takes a lot of time and effort and delivers a lot of frustration, everyday! Second: we want to change and innovate the world. E-mail and paper does not change the world and does not move people. Third: It’s not the best tool for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Louis [sic Luis Suarez actually – PJ] says: “It’s a storage where everything goes, even your knowledge.”

My UNC School of Information and Library Science colleague, Jeff Pomerantz, inspects his own communications habits in light of #noemail on his PomeRantz blog in an article simply titled “email Stats”.

Just down the hall, colleague Rob Capra points to two studies of email use (from his strong background in Personal Information Management):
Voida and Mynatt “It feels better than filing: everyday work experiences in an activity-based computing system”
and
Farnham & Churchill “Faceted identity, faceted lives: social and technical issues with being yourself online” in which he sees data that says that under 25s use email and Facebook for about the same amount of time daily. I have not yet read this paper, but I note in passing that the research was done by Yahoo! scientists.

In the meantime, Peter Honeyman of Michigan says that he is a fan of #noemail even if it means abandoning his profession then points to his important work “Parsing ambiguous addresses for electronic services”

Honeyman (in public conversation on Facebook) says in part regarding email:

now i find the situation so hopeless that i abjure my erstwhile discipline† and declare my allegiance to the #noemail hashtag (which is trending, dontchaknow).

† http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spe.4380170106/abstract and http://www.uucp.org/papers/pathalias.pdf

Old BITNET pal (also in Michigan) Ed Vielmetti writes (here on this blog) and at ReeseNews “Email was great back in the day, but there really has to be something better to replace it for some subset of the tasks it is shoehorned into taking on.” As Ed goes off email for the weekend, he provides a nice list of notable email-quitter/hater articles on his blog.

Other references and discussions can be found in the ReeseNews.org and OpenSource.com articles mentioned in earlier #noemail entries at this blog.

#noemail Q&A with Bascha at OpenSource.com

Right now, #noemail is about 10 times more popular at ReeseNews.com than “Exploring female sexual pleasure”. This is a sure sign of the End Times.

In the meantime, Part Two — the Q&A segment — of the discussion about #noemail at OpenSource.com has been posted.

#noemail interview: Paul Jones abandons his inbox (QnA)

#noemail interview: Paul Jones abandons his inbox (QnA)

Open Source folks are rightly concerned that there are only a few FLOSS alternatives in the activity streams area and no good, as far as I can tell, hyperaggregators for social media done in FLOSS. I’m hoping that we’re wrong and that someone will respond with some good ideas and suggestions.

Luis Suarez and Peter Weller suggest using RSS as a way of dealing with mailing list and notifications, but I haven’t seen or come up with a good way to operationalize that yet. It seems doable though and it makes more sense than filtering email into various unread folders.

Although I’ve been aggressively unsubscribing to listserv lists, some decades old, I’m still seeing about 100+ new messages, post-spam filtering, hit my inbox every 12 hours.

From the OpenSource.com interview:

The point of the #noemail project is to engage more deeply in specialized and inter-operative tools for communications and planning and social engagement. So yes, Google apps for document sharing (like now); Dropbox or Box.com for larger files; Facebook, Diaspora, Hunch, Quora for somethings; Gtalk, AIM, Jabber, FB chat, Skype, etc. for quick communications; various approaches to location; Google calendar–as I’ve used it for several years; etc.

What I’m after is an approach that will allow my friends and co-workers and students to sort out which apps to use and to drop and how to form the usage of each. We’re in a very dynamic moment in these areas, and I expect to see a lot of new apps, a lot of changes to existing ones (big changes for Google and Facebook in the past few weeks for example), and a lot vanishing for various reasons (almost lost Delicious, or is it gone?).

Interoperability and hyper-aggregation rather than any unitary solution is more likely to be successful in the long run. I’m betting, as many are, on some sort of intelligent solutions for dealing with activity streams–some of those streams, like location a few years back, not even collected as yet–to help make sense of the world of communications and cooperation. Even if I just set up an instance of Firefox with a bunch of tabs to all of those services, I’m ahead of the jury-rigged mess that is email.

Reese News on #noemail and current state – more or less

Reese NewsMeredith Clark‘s first Reese News article is “Professor quits e-mail for social media” about the #noemail project. Meredith covers the bases and talks to some good UNC folks including my social-phobic email-loving legal colleague Anne Klinefelter (Anne, I’m easy arrange a coffee meeting with. See my calendar. Add a meeting. No email needed. Peace out, Paul) with whom I have some basic disagreements about how privacy and email work. Meredith has done some good research and the article is worth a read for non-UNC folks as well.

In the meantime, only 36 hours into #noemail, my inbox which had grown to just over 100 messages in 12 hours now reads 1 – 25 of hundreds! I’ll be unsubscribing to lists for days! One important message offers “Unlimited Pole Dancing Classes”; well LivingSocial and Groupon seemed like good ideas at the time.

Luis Suarez and Peter Weller and I have been exchanging Tweets about how to deal with lists. Luis has replaced his list subscriptions within IBM with RSS feeds. A very sane idea. But the UNC Lyris Listserv doesn’t offer an RSS alternative that I can see.

Dear UNC ITS,
Could our next listserv implementation please offer an RSS alternative?
Thanks,
40K campus inboxen

#noemail in OpenSource.com & midday 1 report

#noemail on OpenSource.com

#noemail on OpenSource.com

Basha Harris and I completed an interview/discussion about #noemail using Google Docs the first part of which is now up for reading and commenting on OpenSource.com as “#noemail: Are technology’s early adopters abandoning their email?”.

It was painless to write together on GDocs and fast and introduced me to the new comments feature which is a real plus for collaborative work like an interview.

A little over 12 hours into the first day of #noemail, I peeked into my inbox to see over 100 new messages. None of these were spam — thanks Gmail — but then only 2 of them were useful or required a response. This being the first of the month, there were several messages reminding me that I’m a member of various mailing list (I’ll unsubscribe and look for RSS feeds this evening). Many were nice general messages that I could have picked up in the hall and in most cases had.

The UNC campus and areas of Chapel Hill and Carrboro lost power this morning for several hours. The one computer that needs attention after an outage did need attention after this one. Naturally there had been some changes and my colleague and I needed to find either our great sysadmin who is on vacation or another former staff member to supply a little help getting it live. I read messages from our sysadmin. But the real help came in the form of IMs here on campus. So I didn’t really use email so much as grasp it in desperation and in the end didn’t need it afterall. WCPE is live and in high quality MP3 and OGG again!

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