Accept no substitutes

#noemail in OpenSource.com & midday 1 report

#noemail on OpenSource.com

#noemail on OpenSource.com

Basha Harris and I completed an interview/discussion about #noemail using Google Docs the first part of which is now up for reading and commenting on OpenSource.com as “#noemail: Are technology’s early adopters abandoning their email?”.

It was painless to write together on GDocs and fast and introduced me to the new comments feature which is a real plus for collaborative work like an interview.

A little over 12 hours into the first day of #noemail, I peeked into my inbox to see over 100 new messages. None of these were spam — thanks Gmail — but then only 2 of them were useful or required a response. This being the first of the month, there were several messages reminding me that I’m a member of various mailing list (I’ll unsubscribe and look for RSS feeds this evening). Many were nice general messages that I could have picked up in the hall and in most cases had.

The UNC campus and areas of Chapel Hill and Carrboro lost power this morning for several hours. The one computer that needs attention after an outage did need attention after this one. Naturally there had been some changes and my colleague and I needed to find either our great sysadmin who is on vacation or another former staff member to supply a little help getting it live. I read messages from our sysadmin. But the real help came in the form of IMs here on campus. So I didn’t really use email so much as grasp it in desperation and in the end didn’t need it afterall. WCPE is live and in high quality MP3 and OGG again!

3 Comments

  1. Andria Krewson

    So #noemail was not to blame for the campus power outage? 🙂

    Now serious question: My former coworker Lew Powell is blogging almost every day at http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/ncm/
    And he has hooked up with his former employers at The Observer to have an RSS feed it appears of headlines at the bottom of charlotteobserver.com
    But clicking on links brings a 404.
    So to fix the problem, do you know a real live person on campus I can introduce Lew or an O IT person to?
    I’ll take the answer on Twitter as a DM or here.
    That’s totally off topic but figured you’d know someone. Happy summer and #noemail. Thanks.

  2. Paul

    Looks like the Library moved the blog, several months if not years back, and never changed the RSS feed links. Lew should contact the folks at the Library in the North Carolina Collection and they in turn should contact Library Systems. Looks like now the Bloglines link points to ibiblio.org/ncm/… where the North Carolina Misc began.

    Rejuvenating my own RSS feeds thanks to #noemail and looking at how to redirect some emails there, such as verifications, thanks to hints from Luis Suarez @elsua

  3. Lew Powell

    Thanks Andria and Paul — after some persistent IT work on both ends, the 404 demon has been slain and the Miscellany now appears in the Charlotte News Alliance.

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