How many unread emails do you have in your Inbox?

Is your email Inbox cluttered with communication messages that could wait? There are generally two groups of email users; those that spend a significant amount of time keeping up to read and clear their emails each day or week; the other group simply gives up trying to keep up with the hundreds of emails that comes in each day and only reads those marked as “critical” (thinking that if the email is important enough, the sender will re-send the email again).

Email started off as a humble tool to help us communicate around the world. It served us well but it has been overly abused (think of SPAM, think of the inappropriate REPLY ALL incidents) that many of us suffers from email fatigue.

In the non-enterprise world, blogs have spring up as a essential communication medium in the last ten years. Only in the recent years, using blog in the enterprise organization has begun to pick up.

The more I use blogs at work (both reading others’ blogs and writing my own blog), the more I feel this is the right way to go forward. Lengthy and non-interactive email updates will eventually move to blogs. It may take time to have this change in work culture to sweep across companies employees (imagine how many years it took people to find usage of emails as an alternative to phone calls for certain types of communication) and I believe IT folks should take the lead by example and embrace this change.

Does that mean we need to constantly log on to the blog sites to read updates ? No, this is where RSS feeds come into play.

I have been piloting the use of Outlook 2007, which incorporates RSS functionality. Outlook 2007 has a separate folder to to contain RSS feeds. Whenever there is a new blog article published by someone that I subscribed to, I will receive a new ‘RSS message’ in that folder. This RSS message contains the contents of the blog article, there is not need for me to navigate to the blog website to read the article content. So, you may ask, what is the difference from receiving as an alert in the email Inbox? To me, my email Inbox should be reserved for critical work communication and non-time critical updates should not cluttered the email inbox.

I think what’s missing to drive and promote blogs is to give more folks (who are keen to try out RSS feeds) the means not just to blog but also to view blogs; A internal RSS reader (Outlook 2007?) and a easy way to subscribe to RSS feeds – Blogs and RSS are meant to go together.

If you already have blogs for your employees, do you also make it easier for people to subscribe to the blogs with corresponding RSS links like this one from New York Times?

What do you think?