The old Internet Time Blog had an email subscription box for years. At one time several hundred people subscribed that way. Little did I know that Bloglet, the free service sending out the emails, disappeared. The founder stopped posting to the support blog in March 2004. His last entries were apologies for the service not working right. When I checked in with Bloglet this evening, I found zero subscribers. Everyone had bailed. I just discovered a new service to replace Bloglet. It’s called Feedblitz, and it looks quite slick.
Subscribe by to these blogs by email
Why would you want to do subscribe by email instead of tapping into the RSS feed? According to the guys who run Feedblitz,
- There are lots of good reasons to offer email subscriptions to your blog or service.
Not everyone understands RSS, Atom and XML. Only a fraction of US Internet users knowingly use RSS subscriptions and know what it is. If you don’t provide an alternative mechanism for users to subscribe to your content, you’re missing out on reaching over 80% of your potential audience.
RSS aggregation requires a feed-aware browser or a custom aggregator (either on your desktop or a web service). Many people don’t want the hassle or complexity. Email subscriptions work perfectly for them.
Email is ubiquitous. Everyone has it. It is the Internet’s killer app. Phones, PDAs, almost any connected device can send and receive email. Email is a way to get your content to users on platforms without an RSS aggregator, or to products where getting RSS requires paying for a custom application and excessive airtime charges.
Email is great for fast moving feeds. If you’re offline, your email server holds the feed updates until you’re ready. For busy feeds, which may drop posts after a day or a week, email becomes the only way to read articles published and dropped while you’re not able to use an aggregator, such as when you’re away traveling, on vacation or during a lengthy power outage.
Email is searchable. Every desktop reader and search tool available understands the database formats of common email clients. Feeds delivered to your inbox can then be sorted, managed and searched – along with all your other email. Search engines can’t do that for proprietary aggregator filing systems and custom online aggregation services.
Email is local. You have the feed data right there – you can download and go offline. You can’t do that with an online service.
Are you guys spammers?
No. We will never share email address information unless required to do so by a court. We work very hard to ensure that readers are not spammed, thanks to our confirmation process. We also prevent known spambots from filling publishers’ lists with names (fake or real). All removal requests are immediately honored. Readers may choose to unsubscribe from an individual feed or from all of FeedBlitz. They may do so using the links provided in emails sent to them, from the FeedBlitz web site itself, or by emailing support and requesting to be removed.
Bounced and otherwise unresponsive addresses are automatically handled. If you search online you’ll find many people saying “I tried it and have got no spam.” Try us for a while and you’ll see that we don’t spam. We have a comprehensive privacy policy that is strictly adhered to.
Give it a try. It’s simple to unsubscribe if this doesn’t work for you.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
You’re talking about the ‘old blog’, but I got here via an even older link. http://www.internettime.com/blog/
Greetings and best wishes!
Funny. I have maintained my bloglet subscription and every once in a while I even get an update from them. So their listing of ’0 subscribers’ is false (but about the same level as the rest of their service).
p.s. I still have many times more email subscribers than I do RSS, so there is a point to this service.