Email newsletters: the web 1.0 of permission marketing. How many of these do you subscribe to? How many that you receive do you actually read? I receive a number of email newsletters each day, almost all on the subject of technology in some way, but I have to confess that there are over 300 of them sitting unread in my email, dating back many months. I read these selectively, usually sorted by sender, during times when I have no internet access, such as on long flights (although that practice is now under review if I’m not allowed to bring a laptop on board).
RSS feeds, on the other hand, are the ultimate web 2.0 form of permission marketing: I subscribe to feeds that I want, without passing along any personal information that might result in unwanted spamming to my email. I read them online using Bloglines when I’m connected to the internet (which is almost all the time), and since each entry typically is a single subject rather than a collection of topics that I would find in an email newsletter, I can quickly go through them and figure out which ones that I want to spend more time on and which that I want to delete.
What this all has to do with BPM is that a number of the BPM portals (Business Process Management Group, Business Process Management Institute and Business Process Trends) don’t syndicate their content using RSS, but make you sign up for email newsletters. A couple of exceptions are BPMEnterprise.com, and ebizQ (which hosts this blog), a broader-based integration-related site.
A good percentage of you read this blog via the RSS feed — many through the Feedburner feed that provides some extra widgets on each post — so I know that you appreciate my complaint.