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Mailing List Failure ModesWe had an O'Reilly editors email alias, which grew from editors to almost everyone in the company. At that point we started a radar mailing list for just the "emerging technology" folks. That list has grown as we've added more bloggers to Radar and as more people within the company are interested. Recently we added a dealflow alias because there were people on Radar who aren't covered by OATV's NDAs and frieNDAs. Today Marc Hedlund made a perspicacious comment on the Radar mailing list: O'Reilly mailing lists tend to grow until they include everyone, at which point a new list is created. Please let me know if any of our competitors join. :) Does your company face or project mailing list bloat? Is it crazy to ask whether you have found any strategies that work? The question does rather invite the response "just don't add more people to the list", but that seems overly simple—there are always people with legitimate desire, interest, and relevance. I remember reading (though can't find an URL to cite for it) that Ray Ozzie's policy at Groove was to forbid more than n addresses on CC: lists, where n was something like 3 or 5. Marc pointed me to hottubbing as one system, but I'd love to know what other groups have done to manage the Borgian tendencies of mailing lists.
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Comments: 7
rick gregory [22 September 2007 10:06 AM]
How about keeping the mailing list members small and focused but having messages sent to the list posted to an internal blog? Wordpress can, I believe, post messages sent to a given email address to a blog. Simply define that email address to be the list alias and anything sent to the alias gets posted. People who don't need to be on the list but who are interested in reading the information sent to it can subscribe to the feed.
Sankar KV [22 September 2007 01:45 PM]
Yes, growing mailing lists has been a recurring pattern in the place where I work as well. There has been no easy solution, though. Two problems have resulted out of this: 1. There is a hesitancy amongst some senders to send e-mails out to a large audience. 2. A few end up using large lists in the hopes of improving their visibility in the organization. At least, the first problem is usually addressed by hierarchy or grade based mailing lists.
steve [23 September 2007 04:06 AM]
I wouldn't worry about it. I read Radar a lot less now that there are more people posting.
Tim O'Reilly posts insightful comments that are his own point of view.
The rest of you guys read like any other blog out there, regurgitating common media with a quickie comment on top (especially that Brady Forrest bloke).
So I only come past here every month or two, compared to my previous daily read.
Tim O'Reilly [23 September 2007 07:19 AM]
Ouch!
I think you're rather hard on the rest of our posters, Steve. It's true that we've got a lot more folks posting, and we've started to worry about the diffusion of focus that that causes, but I think you're missing quite a bit if you think that I'm the only poster with a strong point of view.
I learn a lot from Brady's posts (although that may be because I don't read other blogs that cover the material -- mapping news especially -- that Brady covers.
I doubt very much that the eclectic mix of things you'll see here is similar to many other blogs. We cover some Web 2.0 news, as you might expect given that we coined the term, but even there, we tend to stay away from the "me too" coverage of stuff that's covered by Techcrunch.
I do tend to write more opinion pieces than news, but so do Marc Hedlund and Nat Torkington. (Wouldn't you call this piece of Nat's an opinion piece?) As far as our other bloggers go, they each tend to cover an area that we're following because we think they are deeply important. Brady is the program chair for our Where 2.0 conference, and is deep into the location and mapping marketplace. He's also the program chair of our Web 2.0 Expo conferences, and is covering that space as a result.
As to our less regular bloggers, Artur Bergman follows operations and the role of large system administration in the platforms of the future. Peter Brantley, Mike Hendrickson, and Andrew Savikas cover the future of publishing. Andy Oram covers open source. Jimmy Guterman tends to cover a bit about whatever is the subject of the current issue of Release 2.0. Dale Dougherty writes about issues related to the Maker space, especially ones like the recent Shipyard and ACCRC controversies where he wanted to reach people outside the core maker crowd. (The Make blog, despite the technorati ratings that might make you think otherwise, has a much larger circulation than Radar.)
It's also interesting that despite your belief that the value is in the opinion pieces, the news pieces tend to get more traffic. We should probably share some stats on that. We actually do some analysis by post type as well as author.
Of course, the "news" stats are skewed when you are the one to break the news -- or get the "scoop" as newspapers used to say. For example, when I wrote about Pipes (Yahoo! explicitly asked me to break the story because the project was inspired by some of my ideas) or when Artur broke the news about the power outage at 365 Main, we got huge traffic spikes.
Right now, you can get individual RSS feeds by author, if that helps. I will look into doing a separate RSS feed for news vs. opinion.
But in any event, thanks for your comment. It's food for thought. We'd love to hear from other readers if you feel the same way.
Simon [23 September 2007 10:17 AM]
Well, I've found Gmail to be quite good at managing my mailing lists online. It has indicators as to whether a message is sent just to you or to others, and the filtering feature (as well as the spam filtering) are, imho, outstanding. I can't live without Gmail's search tools for my mail, mailing lists and contacts, either.
They announced a new service a month or so back called, I think, "Google apps. for business", where for a (very) low monthly free you can increase your mailbox size to something like 10 meg, or maybe as large as you need, plus you can try that out for free for 30 days. Great for businesses and corporations, I would imagine. There is also Zoho, but I don't think they do mail ... yet.
The only trouble I have found with Gmail is that they take privacy maybe a little too far! If you accidentally delete your password, and don't supply a secondary email address, you have to wait 5 days - 5 days! - until they even *ask you* the security question.
Still, better safe than sorry, depending on your organizations security needs, I guess.
steve [24 September 2007 03:06 AM]
Hi TIm,
Thanks for the response. Yes, I often look back at my comments and think that I was a bit rough. I'm trying to express a viewpoint as accurately as possible, but I'm finding that too much honesty can be as misleading as not enough.
That is an interesting bit of data about the difference between news and opinion pieces. Yes, you are right that I am more interested in the opinion pieces as I get the news pieces from other sources of media.
I think that the posts from Brady and others have been quite good, but they are not the same as a thought leader writing about what has been, what will be, and why. The content of your posts tend to be independent of current events.
By contrast, the other posts tend to be "something happened, brief comment about it". Eg, the datacentre failure, the conference being held, the coverage for TED, etc.
What would have been interesting would have been a deep analysis of the underlying aspects and how it affects other things that have not been (but could be) in the news. I was looking forwards to Peter's promised in-depth review of data centre practices on the basis that they will all fail... that would have been an insight into infrstructure.
I guess I have an unusual preference for news, which is to have a framework of understanding around the field and the news items either confirm or deny that understanding. Eg, when you write about infoware or Web 2.0, you're writing about what will happen in the future as a result of a conceptual framework.
Brady's coverage is a bit annoying to me because it is event reporting and doesn't contain material which explains why location is only becoming important now. The ideas have been around for the last 50 years so what motivation does Brady have for his interest in this area? What does he think will happen next? What will happen that isn't obvious yet?
Streams of posts about Google Earth doesn't provide this background, because it has been done and it is therefore old. Google did this! Google did that! It's not a radar item, because it's already arrived. What is a set of ideas that predict what Google or someone else will be doing later, that they haven't done yet?
Your proposed solution of RSS for news vs events sounds like a good solution. I can't find the RSS feeds for each author (or for posts more than a month ago), but I would use a facility like that.
Thanks,
Steve.
steve [26 September 2007 05:43 AM]
How about an RSS feed for "everyone except Brady"? The sheer number of posts is crap-flooding, and my finger is hovering over the "delete Radar feed permanently" button.
I know this is free and you have no obligation to me, but one person saying something is about the same as 50 people silently going somewhere else.
I have found the Tim RSS feed, but I'd still like to see the others for the time being.