Email must die! That was the battle cry that rang out this morning at Internet Librarian International in London, with Brian Kelly leading the attack. Quote as posted on the ILI wiki by rakerman:
“Poor metadata – bad subject lines, subject lines not changed…”
“Viruses, spam, flame wars…”
“Email is where knowledge goes to die”
It was an excellent presentation and I wholeheartedly agree with Brian. I’m already using RSS, blogs, Wikis and Skype which were all mentioned by him as alternatives but I have been wary of IM, one of the other options he covered. But I am now going to give it a go, especially as May Chang gave some useful pointers to multi-protocol systems in her talk before lunch.
Karen:
Not that I necessarily care much, but the quote “email is where knowledge goes to die” was created by me in 1999 in Sydney Australia. Search Google for that exact quote. 😉
Hi Bill,
Looking through my notes and the proceedings for the conference Brian Kelly did in fact cite the source of the quote as:
e-mail is where knowledge goes to die, Transforming Information into Knowledge at the Portal, Bill French, 22 April 2000 http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/item/5994
Is that correct Bill or is there an earlier one?
Karen:
Sorry for taking more than 2 years to respond. I was busy.
That’s accurate – probably the first place it appeared in an authoritative and “findable” location on the web. 😉
I think the actual quote first appeared in a Sydney newspaper, and it was also spread around a number of Aussie business publications.
The reason I happened upon your question is related to Gist (see gist.com) – a system that may possibly revive dead knowledge in email.
Cheers! –bf
Hi Bill,
Happy New Year
Thanks for the confirmation 🙂 Also thanks for the heads up on Gist. I did wonder at first why I would want to use it when I have an excellent desktop search tool on all my machines but I now see that it does a lot, lot more than that. I have applied to join the beta and am looking forward to trying it out.
Regards
Karen