10 reasons why blogs are better than email
1. Avoid broadcast emails that don’t concern you (instead you can subscribe to the blog - RSS or email, choosing what is sent to you…push vs. pull)
2. Using blog posts instead of emails allows these communications to be stored in a central repository, instead of lost in silos.
3. Each post has a permalink, and you can use comments to discuss (otherwise people may email reply to select people, leaving others to miss out on the discussion).
4. Browse by author, date, month, category, tag…it’s a database I suppose…also full-text search.
Categories/tags provide some sort of context when browsing, and post title is similar to an email subject line.
(I’m yet to see fielded search on a blog, ie. search in the title, author, category, tag, date, etc…)
5. Besides publishing, organising, subscription, notifying, and storing searchable communications in the one go, the blog can also act as a portal by displaying stuff on the sidebar.
6. A new staff member can easily catch the gist of what’s going on by reading the blog, and checking out the links on the sidebar.
People outside the business unit can get a glimpse into the going ons of another business unit…even subscribe
(you may be interested in changing jobs within the same firm, by viewing and/or subscribing to a business unit blog you can get an idea of what’s going on).
Everyone can author the blog, anyone can view the blog.
7. Re-syndicate the contents of the blog to different sections of the intranet, or wherever…people can read your contents; at your blog, in an RSS Reader, in an email client, RSS to IM, RSS to SMS, desktop ticker, menu or browser or system tray reader, desktop widget, or at a website that re-syndicates the contents…also as a an intranet search result.
8. Since it is a simple publishing platform, it may encourage the sharing of tacit knowledge.
9. Since this information is centralised for people to view, it may avoid re-inventing the wheel, or a related business unit may borrow concepts from another business unit, leading to innovations.
10. The idea of stuctured blogging and datablogging enable you to aggregate data from fields in blog posts, even generate tables, graphs, statistics, etc…
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
I’d add that email is broken right now. My mailbox is so full of spam that I almost miss some emails just because I am deleting and skimming so much.
Using email for newsletters is one thing, then you have apps using it for alerts/updates - even more garbage for people to ignore in their inbox.
Comment by Chris - Touchstone Gadget — May 24, 2006 @ 3:45 am