Bloglines user revgeorge has sent this item to you, with the following personal message:
I think I’m abusing Bloglines, specifically the “Email This” link below every post. I’m not sure if I can stop, either.
It started out as innocent as any addiction; I saw a story that I thought a friend would like and noticed that they had a quick way to pass it along. If the person were on IM I would have simply dropped it in a message (no “Hey” or “Ping?” or “Syn?”, I will simply paste the URL in as if their screen name were my personal link drop box) but this was so much easier than actually going to my mail program.
It helps that years of Mutt have caused me to memorize virtually all my friends’ email addresses. It also helps that I avoid social courtesies such as prefacing IMs with “Hey,” which keeps the number of memorized addresses at a minimum.
Once I realized how easy it was, there was no stopping me. Suddenly the guy who told his mom that he does not want to read yet another forwarded email (no doubt making her cry and scream that she had no son, except, you know, her three other sons) was forwarding every stupid thing that popped up on whatever blog happened to update that day.
It’s gotten to the point where a very simple Perl script could replace me; I’m more or less doing keyword matching. “Oh, this talks about the Sidekick 2, let me send it over to Jenny.” “I better make sure Steve sees this Microsoft security news.” “My mom would want to read this opinion about birth.” “The letters B, M and W? Better send that to Ryan. In fact, I’ll just email him every post from Autoblog.”
Sometimes I’ll see a story posted to a site I read, head to Bloglines and email it from there.
There’s a passive-aggressive advertisement for RSS feeds included in each email. I know the emails clearly state that they are from Bloglines. By sending it through Bloglines I’m saying “See what you’re missing by not obsessively watching 90 RSS feeds like me?” To my credit that’s down from 150.
I have to assume that a good third of email sent from Bloglines is from me. I was relieved to hear that I escaped the latest round of spammer arrests. It’s not that I’m sending commercial bulk email, but given the amount I send out I wouldn’t have blamed the DoJ if they had gotten confused.
Am I alone here? Am I the only one abusing this feature? I’m sure I’ll get through this with your thoughts and prayers, and I thank you for your support during this difficult time.
5 responses to “Bloglines confessional”
yes. ๐
Even worse — I’m currently using Hep as my aggregator, which means that (ulp!) my feeds are already being filtered into my mailer. It’s just not pretty… ๐
I don’t mind the stuff that you send me at all – shit, half of the cool stuff that I use and enjoy, I wouldn’t know about – if you hadn’t sent me the link. ๐
I need to get my RSS reader up and kicking again….
George Hotelling is my aggregator.
I mean, I use Bloglines too, but he always gets the best crap to me first. ๐
Bloglines
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