Leo Ryan's Blog

Following a conversation with Mat at Podge I have decided to unsubscribe from all of the bacn; spam email I have actively and willingly subscribed to. Or as it is wikiparently defined  “email you want but not right now”. The end result will be that my in-box contains only messages from people. Oh and spam that Google hasn’t filtered yet. And the requests to moderate the spam comments on my blog. But other than that…just people.

I reasonably figure that if a news source is worth its salt I can subscribe to an RSS feed. For some reason, something to do with the way it is structured and the fact that there are no human to human communications being buried my overflowing RSS Reader fills me with no guilt whatsoever. Odd, but that’s manners for you. My mother must have muttered something about politeness requiring promptly replying to emails. Probably hers. She’s quite modern that way.

(And yes I know that I could probably do this by following their twitter feeds, but until I get the Seesmic desktop onto some kind of epistemological wrestling mat, that’s just a non-starter).

Also as a result of Mat gently ridiculing me after the last tie I made a declaration of intent on this blog I am going to do it here and now as I type. Yep, live blogging at its dullest;

First to go are the daily updates from all of those strange and sparsely populated Linkedin goups. What did I think I was going to get out of Creative Social anyway? Yep, that’s now a weekly digest. Eh? Weekly? Well you never know. I once got a job interview out of one of them. Same treatment for the Linkedin Digital Media Group, in fact most of what comes from it I could actually classify as spam. Do these people think we’re actually that starved of information that we’ll read these shameless self promotions? No, Hortense. I will not try it to see what response I get. Even I have limits.

The Daily Beast and HuffPO? Why is it that I get my US news delivered by email and everything else by RSS? Inconsistent in my news consumption no more. Both journals consigned to the Google Reader. Golly, what’s Sexy Beast? Hmm, might as well add that in as well.

And now for the greatest offender; MediaPost. Both in terms of volume of emails and level of guilt I experience from not reading them the MediaPost emails exceed everything else by a factor of ten, or so. In my To Read file there are approximately 3,465 unread MediaPost emails on search, advertising, creativity, just launched campaigns, mobile, video and something called ‘Just an Online Minute’ which purports to be “A media industry social diary”. Oh I don’t know, I just subscribed in a moment of weakness. But no more. All of them, even the social diary, are all consigned to RSS. Actually this is one of the more convenient sites to do this on. Arianna and Tina both required a little cut and paste, they seemed determined to wind up on my now defunct NetNewsWire reader. But the MediaPost is keen to appeal to all comers.

And Marketing Charts. I do actually read these ones, there’s always something juicy in them. But they’ll be just as juicy in RSS.

There’s more. Oh there’s so much more, but I think you’ve got the idea. And I’m sure some of them have evaded the sweep by not mailing over the holidays. Note to self: re-de-bacn in 2 weeks.

John Battelle has described Google as the database of intentions, but for me email is the in-box of intentions. So what will my RSS reader become? The repository of resolutions? At least now I can see all the spam my lovely readers are leaving. And honestly, I’m not interested in the pictures of your cheating girl friend.