I just love this quote, I found it on a 2003 blog, by Bill French, although I have no idea if it is the original source.
Why do I love it? Because it is eloquent, evocative and accurate. The concept is something I fight all the time.
Email has a lot of weird attributes - it is way to attention grabbing for the value it normally contains and it is so subject to abuse.
I try to work around the disadvantages of email - like promising myself I will only read it twice a day, have days where I try very hard not to send one. So far I think I have failed - email is killing my creativity, draining my time and is indeed a knowledge sink.
I still optimistically think that a stranger might actually one day send me one that's worth reading.
2 comments:
Nigel - thanks for the kind comments about me. I believe I was the first to say "email is where knowledge goes to die". It was crafted as part of a presentation I made to the Australian Computing Society in 1999. Ironically, this presentation was made about three blocks from the current offices of the Google Wave development team.
I recommend you take some time to investigate Gist (http://gist.com).
Great to hear from you Bill! I will certainly check out Gist.
We are working on a lot of corporate networking and mash ups over at Claromentis, so I will be interested in your approach.
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