Imagine if You Could Get Only Emails You Want

Does this sound like you?:

"While technical countermeasures do a passable job of blocking spam and phishing attacks from beyond the firewall, the sheer volume of E-mail from legitimate senders has companies looking for ways to communicate through the clutter. "People get a lot of what we'll call occupational spam, where there's information that may be delivered to you every day, but you can have too much of it," says Michael Pusateri, VP of engineering with the Disney ABC Cable Networks Group."

My new favorite phrase du jour—"occupational spam"—is all too familiar:  The all-hands inquiries and announcements, the administrivia, the alerts about things you neither give a damn about or could do anything to affect if you did.

So just consider it another component of the everyday friction brought to us by technology?

Actually, enlightened companies are realizing there's an alternative:  According to Information Week, it's RSS.  The advantages?

• Email is pushed to you unbidden; with RSS, you only get what you have opted to subscribe to.
• RSS feeds are inherently categorized (one firm set up a "30 days past due" receivables feed for the accounting department, e.g.—contrast that to getting one separate email for each past-due account, scattered randomly throughout your inbox).
• A tremendous number of feeds can be scanned at once from a single screen.
• Because RSS was designed to follow the "headline plus story" format, it's inherently an efficient conveyor of meaning—what you want to read more about vs. what you don't.

And we're not done.  RSS is also agnostic (or should that be, "promiscuous"?) about what's moving through the feed:

"RSS also has this perk for business environments: It handles a variety of data types, not just news articles. Words and numbers, the bulk of most databases, are easily converted into XML for transport. Other kinds of data, such as MP3 audio files, can be included in RSS feeds, too. In essence, RSS can serve as a lightweight data-integration system."

Firms such as Traction Software and KnowNow are beginning to provide "enterprise" RSS tools, but there are other ways to simply subscribe to RSS feeds, most of them free.

One 1,000-lawyer firm hired a consultant to estimate (conservatively) the cost of all-hands emails in lost productivity, and the answer was.....over $125,000 per month.  (All-hands emails are now forbidden at that firm.)   And now, with RSS, you no longer have the excuse of "but there's no other way."