3 reasons for choosing feeds instead of emails @ work

Some weeks ago I listed 22 problems with emails and said that some of them can be solved with RSS feeds. How?

Freedom: You can choose which feeds you subscribe while you can only choose some of your email delivery lists, others are given and some of them you can never leave because they are based on your organization not based your interest. So while emails are sometimes spam feeds should not be. Keeping the delivery lists up-to-date is taking a lot of time (can you add me to your list? and my team too? please remove me from the list! just add me back after my holidays) while with feeds the receivers do the same work.

Openness: When you receive an email that is sent to hundreads of people you can´t know what the other receivers think about it. It is not acceptable to use reply all feature but one replies only to the sender and then the sender might get the same question over and over again. If the same message is e.g. blogged receivers can see the comments posted by other readers and they don´t need to ask something that is already answered. And it´s not only comments - readers can sometimes contribute by voting or giving points to good entry.

Saved disk space: People are archiving their emails (and it might be difficult to find them again depending on the folder structures) - the same 1 MB email might be saved by thousands of people. The feeds from wiki pages or blogs are saved in one place (and if the writers are using categories and tags they can be also easily found afterwards).

PS. The summer vacation period has started in Finland so I wish you nice&relaxing vacation and when you go back to the office think about your communication. Could you do it better?