Use Blog instead of sending e-mails

Steps involved

What you have to do?

• Create a blog on blogger, livejournal, wordpress, tumblr, Posterous or vox. If you already have one then ignore this step.
• Whatever you want to send through email, write it in a blog post or forward that email to the secret email address your blogging platform gives you, something like post@posterous.com.
• Only this first time, let your contacts know that any communication /update (which is not confidential in nature) you make will be through your blog address.

What your friends have to do?

• Check the link sent by your friends.
• Look for Subscribe icon on the web page.
• Subscribe to the blog.
  

  If you use IE7 or Mozilla Firefox, then follow the instructions given in this post. If you use Firefox, you can install an add-on “Newsfox” and read all the latest content from your friends as and when they write it. If you are using Outlook 2007, you will get the feeds automatically. (To know how it all works, read this post.)

• If you want to respond to them, write a comment on their post. That is your reply, everyone will see that.

What is the benefit?

• No one has to write big e-mails.
• No one has to maintain those e-mails in folders.
• Everyone saves tons of free space for other stuff in their mail boxes.
• No need to send e-mails every time anyone writes anything new.
• Everyone can read the content in his/her own luxury free time.
• The content is always available. You don’t loose it if you haven’t accessed it in a while like Live Hotmail and Yahoo. (I hate when Live Hotmail and Yahoo disable accounts for not accessing it for some time.)

Constraints

• You cannot share confidential content with free blogging services. Though these days with Posterous and Tumblr etc. you can create a private blogs which people read by entering a password.
• If you are sharing copyright material then you will have to think about it before putting it in your blog post because of copyright issues.
• You can’t write personal stuff there like specially for your girl friend, wife, fiance and all. However, if it is a private blog,then I don’t see any issue in that too.

Myth

People think that the content they write will be accessible to everyone, even if it is not shared with them.

No, there are facilities to protect your content for unauthorized access. Like in vox & livejournal, and Posterous you can set who sees your post before you post it.
If you post frequently for a similar set of people, then you can start a Group blog on Vox, Tumblr or Posterous.

So in nutshell, blogs can be used instead of emails. You can use blog for anything and everything.

Hope you agree with my analysis.  I would love you hear your views about this.  So throw in your comments below to let me know what you think.