Library clips

I was thinking of ways to notify people about updates on a corporate blog if they are not RSS Savvy. Of course they could subscribe to the email alert, but what about new people, how will they know about the blog or to subscribe to it….the other option is to push emails the old fashioned way, but I think we are moving into more of a pull landscape.

When someone joins an organisation they are placed into the appropriate email groups in order to communicate with the right people to do their job…so why can’t this happen as well with blog subscriptions.

I wonder if you can enter an outlook email group into a email subscription box in a corporate blog, if you could when ever a new staff member jpins an email group, they will automatically be subscribed to the blog
(this is kind of “push” as the person can’t decide if they want to join, well it is “pull” without consent).

Maybe OPML is the open answer to this question, you could keep an OPML URL of a heap of email addresses, and when ever someone is added to that OPML, then whatever subscribes to it will also see the changes.

Hang on, this seems like I’m asking the corporate blog to subscribe to the OPML, instead of the other way around.

OPML for email would also be good if you started a new email client or address and you wanted to import/export contacts, or even contacts from another type of service…OPML is the answer as it is non-proprietary.

So back to my question, can you subscribe to a blog with an email group file that represents lots of email addresses?

If so will it be dynamic, so new people added to the list will be receive blog content by email…maybe it could recognise the contact has been added and send out an automatic welcoming.

Can this be done with an OPML URL that contains email addresses as items, at the moment OPML has 3 item types: text, links, rss (”links” can also be used for a non-HTML URL, such as an OPML URL)…will we need another type called “mailto”?

OPML possibilities are endless, what else can we do with packaged data?