See: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/business/media/for-email-a-death-greatly-exaggerated.html
Hat tip to Cynthia Gibson's email list. :-) This is probably the reason we are one of the only non-profits left hosting sustained local online community engagement on open source technology - we stuck to our guns and our instincts. We kept email central to both our delivery and our publishing model. We basically democratized the email newsletter by letting any member publish easily and by having people subscribe to the community as a whole. So one "ask" to get the public committed to being informed/engaged and then "location, location, location" - the inbox - is sustained in almost a broadcast way until the person turns it off (which they tend not to due to local info relevance). If you host with a typical "free" email list/online group host, then you are stuck with the features they give you and you can't wrap in your own sponsorship or advertising. Instead all your hard online community development work feeds your users to advertisers paying someone else. However, the NYTimes story aside, I am not sure how this will jive with online teens who are reporting "exchanging" email daily at 6% these days: http://online.wsj.com/articles/how-to-use-tech-like-a-teenager-1402434802?mod=e2tw So, to me one of the exciting challenges is how to bridge this generational divide with local online spaces that allow people to choose their technology, not "just use Facebook," and keep people in place connected more openly. Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.org Twitter: http://twitter.com/democracy Tel/Text: +1.612.234.7072 ᐧ ----------------------------------------- Group home for Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire: http://groups.dowire.org/groups/newswire Replies go to members of Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire with all posts on this topic here: http://groups.dowire.org/r/topic/35FPgzHA3BHKGi04IuaYr4 For digest version or to leave Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire, email [email protected] with "digest on" or "unsubscribe" in the *subject*. Newswire - Steven Clift's Democracies Online Newswire is hosted by Democracies Online - http://dowire.org.
