Cyber Millenium

With spam filters on high alert, delivering a newsletter by e-mail is not as easy as it was until a year ago. If you reach your subscriber’s inbox (without getting diverted to a junk folder), you still have to compete for attention among dozens? or even hundreds? of new messages. 1. A blog is not “email” A weblog or blog, on the other hand, is a page of your site that can be updated several times a week with new content. If the reader has “subscribed” to your blog, he or she receives an alert (consisting of the title and brief summary) every time I post new information. That is, in the same way that you can include a teaser paragraph in your newsletter with a link to read the entire article on your site. If you’re thinking that subscribers have to proactively “visit” your blog (a “pull” tactic) vs.

having an ezine or e-newsletter delivered to them (a “push” approach) is good news. You can subscribe to a blog using downloadable software called a news reader. NewsGator is very popular, as it integrates seamlessly with Outlook. There are lots of newsreaders to choose from, many of them free. Once installed on your desktop, the newsreader (also called news aggregator) grabs the latest updates to your blog via an RSS feed. Not to worry what RSS (stands for Really Simple Syndication). Only I have faith that RSS is a new way to publish and distribute content on the Web without using email.