Email as the driver for everything

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[Updated 19th June] Reality hits home ... all is not as easy I may have made it seem
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As I've noted in previous posts most of my mates/family have no idea about all these new sanatravious Web 2.0 things - RSS means nothing, a blog is something that Mike is obsessed by and "social networks" sounds like a trendy liberal university lecture.

Email is king/queen.

Everything is driven by what comes into the InBox or resides in the Sent Items.

And so, how can I bring the life online world to my mates/family using only email?

Receiving info
This is the easier one as RSS can be delivered via email and Feedburner is your friend. To sign-up to my RSS feeds using email is as simple as supplying your email address, clicking the confirmation link received and sitting back to received the flood - give it a go at my subscription page

Easy!

But what if the RSS feed they want doesn't use an email subscription (it's optional with Feedburner and turned off by default)? Two options:

Posting/creating items
Whilst this may seem a little trickier most of the better services provide and email-in facility once you've set-up the service (blog, group, Flickr etc). The following is a sample using the services I happen to use but I'm sure you can find many more:
One caveat is that you'll need to visit the website to set-up the service and to get the specific email address you can use - Groups excepted, this can all be done via email.

The social networks are probably the ones you can't use by email ... I've looked long and hard to see if LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace etc accept 'instructions' via email ... they don't. These must be the only places that, to create content, you have to visit the web sites themselves.


Summary
If you're within the 80% of my world using email it doesn't mean you can't be a read my online contributions (I can hear the cries of "Huzzah!" from here) - subscribe using email to updates from anything I post/upload [here].

If you want you can have your own online life site then most sites let you post up content from the comfort of your own InBox (once you've been online and created the relevant accounts).

However, "Web 2.0" isn't just about easing the creation and sharing of content with the key component of 'interaction' being equally as important - commenting, linking, collaborating and the like. Fully interacting with "Web 2.0" is much a harder proposition from the safety and warmth of an InBox and will never likely to be fully realised - two differing worlds colliding.

At some point you're just going to have to bite the bullet and fire up that browser ... and when you do, you'll be hooked!

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