Blogs are the new mailing lists

Since 1995 I’ve run a mailing list called bryans-list, which is basically a place for me to send interesting and amusing things I run across in my journeys around the Internets. At the beginning it was mostly a way to send Usenet posts to people who didn’t read Usenet, and coordinating meet-ups of various friends. It has since evolved into mostly a joke list, where people forward entertaining emails or URLs.

In the past couple of years the list has suffered greatly from my lack of time and interest, and the same lack on the part of other subscribers. I frequently find interesting things, but can’t be bothered sending an email about it. At times I think it’d be good to send something, but it’d be useful to include some ‘rich text’ type features, like fonts and images, that I’m not willing to subject people to in email.

I’ve become a big consumer of blogs over the past year, and I’ve noticed that a lot of the content that used to be going out over mailing lists is now going into blogs. This is especially true when one person, or few people, were driving the content through the list. It’s much easier to setup a blog and just have people point their RSS aggregator at it than to setup and maintain an email mailing list.

So, thus, a blog. I may still forward things to my bryans-list mailing list from time to time, but I’m more likely to post something here, then forward a summary note to the list telling people to come look.

We’ll see how it goes.