Is the Reply-All Button Making Us Stupid?

I've taken on technology -- PowerPoint, email, Google, among others -- as making us stupid.

I think the Reply-All button, a subset of email, deserves its own shout out.

Last night, a glitch in an email distribution list from Jason Calacanis, made a lot of people stupid.

Calacanis has had a high profile career, including stints as founding editor of Silicon Alley Reporter, a founder of Weblogs, and a former Entrepreneur in Action, at Sequoia Capital. Currently he serves as the founder of Mahalo.com Inc., and his email distribution list is his contrarian way to communicate his thoughts and influence the conversation instead of blogs. Which he says are dead.

So the glitch: somehow, people were able to respond to Calacanis' latest email -- about why we shouldn't trust Facebook (he says they're out to exploit our privacy). Perhaps the initial group of responses thought their emails would go only to Jason.

But there was that glitch.

So that everyone on Calacanis' distribution list received every single reply.

I don't blame the original responders, who might not have known their emails were hitting everyone's in box.

But some people quickly realized, and used the glitch to promote their own companies and agenda.

I think that shows initiative but also bad form; and a bunch of people responded telling the offenders -- and everyone -- that they thought it bad form. (I did not respond via the email, only on this blog.)

Then a bunch of others got upset.

And this is where the real stupidity came in.

A new wave of emails went out asking people not to spam everyone else on the list. For example, the guy who wrote, "Stop f--ing replying all you f--ng idiots." (I know it's the Internet, but my kids might read my blog.)

The folks complaining to the entire distribution list about not wanting to get spammed could have taken a better route. They had the offending spammers' email addresses; they could have just responded to the spammers directly. Instead, they hit Reply-All, and spammed the rest of us.

By definition, those people complaining by email about getting spam were also sending spam.

Making it more annoying for the rest of us who patiently waited for Calacanis to resolve the issue. (Which he has, a dozen hours later.)

I think that's incontrovertible evidence that the Reply-All makes us stupid.

Are Blogs Dead?

The print edition of the Nov. Wired ran an article called "Kill Your Blog." The online version had a different title, "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 ." Paul Boutin, a correspondent with ValleyWag, summarized his own article like this:

@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won't find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook? That's all you need to read from my essay at the front of Wired's new November issue. The rest is good, thanks to stellar editing, but these days a 600-word essay — and a headline like "Kill Your Blog" — only stand out in print. See? They changed it online.

I think blogs will continue, but the article makes at least one interesting point:

Scroll down Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and you'll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.

I don't think blogs are dead. But I do think it's much more difficult now for bloggers to break through the clutter. That doesn't mean you should stop blogging. It just means don't expect tons of advertising revenue and a book deal.

Jason Calcanis Claims Blogging is Dead; Here's Why Email is on Life Support

I think Jason Calcanis' now-famous proclamation that blogging is dead is wrong for one specific reason: he thinks the replacement for blogging is an email distribution list.

Here are reasons I think email is dead:

• Email is slow -- other technologies provide instant access and response.
• Email is unreliable -- your messages might not make it through to the recipient. I regularly get and receive calls to make sure an important email has arrived.
• Spam -- like college tuition and the price of oil, spam increases, despite new so-called solutions to fight spam. I don't think we'll ever win the war on spam. But other communications tools, like instant message and contact via social networks, can reduce --- but not eliminate -- the quantity of spam. (Case in point: TwitterSpam: people who select thousands of people to "follow" on Twitter in the hopes that people will "follow" them in return in the hopes they'll check out whatever it is the TwitSpammers are trying to sell.
• Email tends to overwhelm "in boxes" with information users didn't need. A much better way is to subscribe to RSS feeds, resulting in less clutter, less guilt.
• Email, for most of us, is less likely to have significant impact beyond our immediate friends and family. And every time someone forwards the email, the meat of the email gets pushed lower and lower on the screen, formatting changes, etc., diluting the impact it could have.

The other reason I think blogging is not dead yet is that you're reading this on a blog, not from my email distribution list.

It's the End of Blogging as We Know It, Part II

The interesting coda to Jason Calcanis' "retirement" from blogging because he says blogging is dead.

In addition to his new email outlet, he continues to use Twitter.

I guess Twitter, or microblogging, is not dead -- yet.

Until something else supplants it.

Here's an additional point: it's taken a long time for print to get to its current stage: on-the-edge-of-doom. But it might not actually die, and go the way of buggy whips.

Radio continues to survive long after it was written off with the advent of TV.

But I'd bet that Twitter and other Web 2.0 sites vanish before print and radio do, if only because print and radio have a long tradition. Although they tend to be older, there are lots of people who like the feel of the ink smudging their fingers as they flip the pages of their morning paper.

I use Twitter, but Twitter is the latest trend. There's not much heritage to it yet, and while people who use it can seem to be obsessed with Twitter, the vast majority of people even in the tech sector are not using Twitter. Perhaps Twitter adoption is still in its infancy.

But if blogging is dead, how much longer can Twitter expect to live? Or, if it does survive, with its limit of 140-character messages, what does that say about our attention span?

(PS: I don't think blogging is quite dead yet.)

It's the End of Blogging as We Know It, According to Jason Calacanis

Blogger Jason Calacanis has retired from blogger, saying blogging is dead. He's now shifting to email. Read about why in TechCrunch's Jason Calacanis’ First New Email Post.

Here are Calacanis' main reasons for saying blogging is dead:

• "Folks are so desperate to be heard–and we all want to be heard that’s why we blog–that the effort put into being heard has eclipsed the actual hearing."
• "Bloggers spend more time digging, tweeting, and SEOing their posts than they do on the posts themselves."
• Five years ago, to be a successful blogger, you had to “show up every day.” "Today? What’s required is a team of social marketers to get your message out there, and a second one to manage the fall-out from whatever you’ve said."
• "Excelling in blogging today is about link-baiting, the act of writing something inflammatory in order to get a link."

He also provides an explanation why he thinks communicating by email is more personal. TechCrunch says it expect Calacanis's objective in switching to email "will not achieve what he has set out for - and that is to have a conversation with the top slice of his readers." And I agree with TechCrunch.

Why? Here's what TechCrunch says: because "You will likely see his emails re-published, probably on a blog and probably with comments and everything else."

Just like I've done here.