Winner!

Upon receiving the notification that I am the winner, I was immediately struck with, "oh no, what am I going to say or do?!?"

Having squandered 47.75 of the hours I was given to come up with something, I am hoping that in 15 minutes I have left, I can come up with something interesting to say to all 20k+ of you.

Actually, to tell you the truth, I am not that interested in saying something and am really just interested in the effectiveness of The Listserve as a platform for communication.

Email gets a bad rap these days and the reasons are good: we get too much spam, it is too easy to abuse with mass forwards, overuse of the carbon copy feature, and packed inboxes overwhelm users. Many students of mine never really used email in the first place, choosing SMS, IM, Twitter, Facebook and the like to telecommunicate with their peers. (My fear with all of this is that we are segmenting and tying ourselves to proprietary commercial platforms (at least in the case of IM, Twitter, Facebook maybe not with SMS) without even considering the repercussions.)

I love the constraints that The Listserve puts on the messages. No links, no rich text or images and so on. Back to the basics. Our only mode of interaction is the reply button. Fantastic!

So, if you will, humor me and send a reply! I would love to see how many of the 20k+ that I am writing to will! I'll email you back with the data and some of the comments after a week or so.

Oh, I promise not to sell your email address or spam you or even email ever again after sending the data and comments.

Have a good day!

-shawn


Shawn Van Every
Buffalo, NY

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