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Tim O'Reilly
Oct. 27, 2002 05:08 PM
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I'm only an occasional blogger. There's only so much time in the day, and most of my informal writing goes out over email, not to the web. What's more, most of my web visits are triggered by a link sent to me in email, and most of the interesting pages I discover I send to people (such as my editors) via email rather than via a public blog. I get a lot of interesting mail, both from personal and business correspondents, and from mailing lists, and pass a lot of it along to other people or lists. I wish it were as easy to forward an email message to a blog as it is to send a link from the web out to an email recipient.

Every once in a while, I do take the time to blog things from mailing lists. For example, just this afternoon, I blogged an item from Dave Farber's excellent Interesting People mailing list -- a list that effectively acts as a kind of email blog for technology and policy issues, and was "blogging" before the web even existed.

I also took the time to recreate in my own blog a long posting that I sent to the Free Software Business mailing list. Both of these great lists have web-facing archives, which at least makes it possible to blog them. But I sure wish it were easier. I was back and forth with cut and paste. It would be so nice to have an email to blog gateway, so I could just put my blog as an email recipient, and have some way of generating the appropriate links to the web archive of the mailing list so that people could follow the thread, and not just see the text of the message. Part of the problem is that the various mailing list archive tools create truly unreadable URLs, like "http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?mss:8151:200210:hlpdhbfgkkkhjgnapmgj".

But apart from the technical challenge, there's an interesting social challenge. The blogging community likes to congratulate itself on "blogrolling", and its power to link to other interesting blogs in near real-time, but the fact is that there are an awful lot of interesting conversations going on outside blogspace. And it would be great to see more people doing what I wish I did more often, cross-linking between email-space and blogspace.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to Foo Camps ("Friends of O'Reilly" Camps, which gave rise to the "un-conference" movement), O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. In addition to O'Reilly Media, Tim is a founder of Safari Books Online, a pioneering subscription service for accessing books online, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.

Comments on this weblog

Showing messages 1 through 13 of 13.

Get blog contents via e-mail
2003-01-21 10:12:56 shantanuo [View]

http://www.bloglet.com
You add the content to your site as usual. The people who have subscribed will get an e-mail with the contents you have published. They even don't need to visit your site to check "what's new" and can subscribe to more than one blog.
It's not what you are looking for. But I hope it will help.
http://www.flexwindow.com
FlexWindow does what you need. But the content can not be published on your personal bogger but on flexwindow site!

It took me 2 hours
2003-01-07 15:14:04 anonymous2 [View]

Ok, from scratch, this took me 2 hours to reverse-engineer the html POST method that my blog (Pivot) uses to add entries, and author a perl script to post them from a filter in .qmail

Great idea Tim...but next time start coding instead of whining. If we can do it, you can too.

The python script to blog via email is here:
2002-12-08 06:32:02 anonymous2 [View]

http://alevin.com/projects/mailblog.hml

To be quite trite..
2002-10-30 13:00:48 braxtonian [View]

The weblog is, in and of itself, not conducive to one subject matter or another.

The blog is by its very essence a smattering of information--who would want to subscribe to something that is best suited for the skim-and-pick method of viewing, where no single line of discourse is common from day-to-day. The user would lose all control of what they viewed, relying exclusivly on the delete key for any escape.

Further, the blogger themselves would have to cope with the limitations of e-mail that isn't present in browsers--namely archiving and the inability to be linked to or found via search engine.

I can completely understand the supplementary e-mailing of blogs to dedicated fans who eat your every word (as if this ever happens), but I cannot understand a blogger who accepts the limitations of e-mail.

Of course, all of that might be out-weighed by more e-mail for "great deals" on Viagra and mortgages.

I'm blogging by mail
2002-10-30 01:52:14 Giles Turnbull | [View]

I've started three weblogs. Two of them have already become mailing lists, and one is currently suspended pending me making a decision about doing the same thing with it.

I've found that I simply don't get on very well with the "weblog way" of doing things. But I still want to post lots of stuff online in a timely manner. And I spend *lots* of time in email clients.

A long time ago, I postulated the idea of "emailblogs", essentially an application or service that offers people Blogger-level simplicity for setting up and maintaining a weblog style site via email:

http://gorjuss.com/luvly/20011211-emailblogs.html

For me, posting to the web from an email message is the perfect blend of simplicity and ease of use. I am never far from an email client. And it makes creating posts offline very easy.

My luvly mailing list *has* become a weblog, of sorts, on my homepage:

http://gorjuss.com

... the most recent posts appear there automagically. I send stuff to a specified address with info in the subject line in the following format:

username:password:filename.html//Title of post

Software written by my friend Matt Hunt (http://arghh.org) then converts the text in the message body into a web page using the filename I've specified (this gets round the problem you identified of mailing list archiving tools creating unreadable URLs). The look and feel can be controlled by standard style sheets.

The software then forwards the message, stripped of everything before (and including) the "//" in the subject line, to a bog-standard Mailman mailing list.

That way, with one post from an email client, I update my web site and send stuff to the list at the same time.

For me, it's perfect, although I can see it won't appeal to everyone.

It's always surprised me that there's not more demand for "emailblog" type tools.

Spaces - An Email/PIM software application with plans in this area
2002-10-29 06:24:50 garycoady [View]

Spaces (http://www.dynamicobjects.com/) is a Java-based email/PIM application which will have its first release soon (November). It already supports IMAP, POP and RSS as external data sources, and can post to Blogger-API-compliant weblog software as well as to normal SMTP servers. It also incorporates virtual views of data - waiting to get a copy to see how comprehensive this is - Diego says in his weblog at http://www.dynamicobjects.com/~diego/weblogs/arf/archives/2002_10_24.html#000484 that his design for spaces takes a similar form to that being suggested by Mitch Kapor in the design notes for OSAF - which would suggest that the virtual views feature is actually one of the important parts of the application.

See http://www.dynamicobjects.com/features.html

One of the planned future features is:
"Improved integration with weblogging software such as Radio Userland, MovableType and Blogger, to enable collaboration with users of those applications"

While it is still a "planned feature", I think that sending a mail to SMTP and a weblog simultaneously would be an obvious way to perform the feature described (possibly with commentary? we'll see).

PGP + Mail Alias = Gateway
2002-10-28 22:05:55 Derek Vadala | [View]

Seems like an email gateway to do this would be fairly trivial, at least from what I've seen of the O'Reilly Network blog forms. I suggest that PGP is probably a good way to keep this secure. Properly signed mail makes it through, other messages are rejected. A neat hack would be queuing foreign entries for approval. Perhaps than you could publish the alias for your email-to-blog gateway and then comment on and approve interesting links and messages from others.

As a blogger here, I'd certainly like to see at least the rudimentary gateway. Tim, you sign the checks, why not make it happen?

Group Forming list (sorta) doing this
2002-10-28 15:27:21 pearsonp [View]

I've been bridging the group-forming mailing list (at aquameta.com) to a Movable Type blog at http://dev.myelin.co.nz/gf/ for a day or so now.

Eric at Aquameta is generating an RSS feed for the mailing list, which I'm polling with a Python script and decoding with Mark Pilgrim's rssparser.py. When new items appear in the feed, it connects to the MT blog using the MetaWeblog API and pushes them up.

Group Forming list (sorta) doing this
2002-10-29 18:29:01 Tim O'Reilly | [View]

Transforming a complete mailing list into blog form is not what I'm talking about. What I really want to see is more support in the tools for going seamlessly back and forth. Mailers with "blog this" buttons, and mail/news lists with enough metadata (e.g. urls for message and thread) that a blog could be auto-constructed without a lot of cut and paste.

But heck, I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. Creating more intersections between blogspace and mailspace, however it happens, is the bigger issue behind what I wrote.

Blogged mailing lists
2002-10-28 14:11:20 anonymous2 [View]

Personally I'd like to see mailing list archiving tools adding a "blog" option to the archive browsers.

This would be managed by the list administrators/monitors. Each 'noteable' message would get tagged (and tag-lined if need be) for the blog front end to catch.

Inspiration? Trying to summarize the content of comp.lang.python and announce for DDJ Python-URL! wishing I also had the remaining lists, and the collective insight of the veterans & administrators.

I'm not sure that functionality would give you what you want due to timeliness. Perhaps simply adding the archive URL to the message itself would be a slight help.

Just wrote a small python script to do this...
2002-10-28 00:45:07 adina_levin [View]

Uses Mark Pilgrim's PyBlogger interface. Works with any weblog that supports the Blogger API (tested with Blogger and MovableType). I'd be happy to share.

- Adina
levin.blogspot.com

Just wrote a small python script to do this...
2002-10-29 18:26:18 Tim O'Reilly | [View]

Please do. Feel free to post it here!

Just wrote a small python script to do this...
2002-10-31 09:28:46 adina_levin [View]

OK. Will clean, document, and post this weekend.

- Adina

Showing messages 1 through 13 of 13.

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