Jon Stahl’s Journal

I’m tired of writing HTML formatted email.  I’m going to make a clean break to plain-text, and thanks to Outlook-QuoteFix, I’m going to be able to ensure that I can properly format my plain-text replies.  This will be an experiment to see what it’s like to break the HTML email habit.  Wish me luck.

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My colleague Steve Andersen recently penned a short article entitled “Some Observations on Nonprofit Software” that lays out a few of the core assumptions we hold about how software tools for the nonprofit sector can and should play nice together. The core of the argument goes like this: Missions are serviced only by […]

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Seth Gottlieb pulls together a short rant and then a large dose of common sense about why email is an ineffective collaboration tool, and what can be done instead. UPDATE: changed “effective” to “ineffective” thanks to eagle-eyed reader T.B.

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… will well-meaning activists figure out that a half-megabyte PDF file is not the most effective format for an emailed event invitation? I’m just saying. Now for the constructive part: it’s better to send a highly compressed JPEG in the body of the message.  And even better to send legible text and/or HTML.

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Reading Zack Rosen’s assertion that building applications inside Drupal-the-framework makes more sense than loose integration of complementary applications triggered some thinking that’s been rattling around in my head for a while. I think that the next few years are going to bring tremendous challenges for applications that do not easily communicate with other applications that are […]

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Emily Thorson of EchoDitto offers some great pointers on why and how to write compelling emails, which are they key to driving online action. Real-life fact: email drives traffic and participations. Implications: Stop stressing about your website. Yes, it should have regularly updated content and look halfway professional. But it shouldn’t drive your strategy, it should be […]

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Are usually pretty good ones, but these two hunches are, I think, especially solid. Drawing on a recent column by Michael Stein noting some trends in transactional giving for post-Tsunami relief, Ed theorizes: Supporters don’t want to be members. As Michael noted, people are increasingly giving on an “as-needed basis,” and I think […]

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Interesting article about the use of email network analysis in the Enron case in today’s NYTimes. Scientists had long theorized that tracking the e-mailing and word usage patterns within a group over time - without ever actually reading a single e-mail - could reveal a lot about what that group was up to. The […]

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We’re in the thick of a state legislative session here, which means that action alerts are flying fast and furious. I think there’s a lot of poorly written and ultimately ineffective alerts out there, but I can’t prove it. Which leads me to an idea… What if we organized the infrastructure to write and test […]

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MarketingSherpa has got some great viral marketing case studies and some solid high-level viral marketing wisdom this week. Check it out this week before it goes behind their registration-only system.

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In the past week or so I’ve read through a few “website plans” and “online communications plans” that have been put together for Northwest environmental groups and all in all, I’ve been pretty dissatisfied with them. None of them seem to deliver all of the elements that you’d need in order to go all […]

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Veteran email marketer Bill McCloskey offers a few good insights on why email discussion lists are still one of the most valuable group communication tools out there, and what makes a truly effective email discussion list. What makes a good email discussion list? Without a doubt, it is the quality of the people on […]

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Kellan links to Riseup.net’s documentation/setup howto for their mail server. Very, very impressive work.

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Postfix: The Definitive Guide looks like one for the bookshelf here at ONE/Northwest. It’s reviewed over on Slashdot.

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MailbyRSS is a free service from a company called iupload that allows folks to create RSS feeds by sending email messages to iupload’s servers. This potentially offers a brain-dead way to easily create syndicated feeds for sites that don’t use content management systems. Scot Finnie, publisher of tech newsletter “Scot’s Newsletter” is trying MailbyRSS out, […]

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CMFNewsletter 1.0 was released a couple of days ago. It’s an email newsletter module for Plone.

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Marty Kearns is sounding the alarm bells because he received a copy of the new “Beagle” virus with a return address at PoliticsOnline, the online newsletter about e-campaigning. Marty hypothesizes that perhaps hackers are attempting to target online Democratic GOTV organizing efforts. Now I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but […]

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“Danah Boyd”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/01/18/mailing_list_visualizations.html links to social circles, a tool from marcos weskamp that can subscribe itself to a mailing list and produce some simple pictures that map the traffic on the list. Danah raises the obvious (and important) concern about the temptation to create public visualizations of private listservs. And, in a related post, Danah also […]

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The SpamBayes Outlook Plugin, my favorite anti-spam tool, just released version 0.81. Highly recommended.

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Gideon notes a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. As you might expect, the Northwest (which Pew unfortunately defines as only Washington and Oregon) is one of the most wired regions in the country. The thing that most jumped out at me was that we have a larger proportion of seniors online than […]

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