In the conversation over at O’Reilly, Giles Turnbull writes that he simulcasts his mailing list as a weblog.
I like this idea, though my personal preference is the inverse of Giles; I try to keep the number of inbound mailing lists down to a critical few, and prefer going out and browsing a wider variety of blogs and list archives. Keeps the inbox cleaner and the guilt level down.
I was planning on writing a utility to generate an email version of the blog once the site goes live with Movable Type. The added wrinkle is that I want to set up the lists by topic, so people can subscribe to posts on personal updates, or complex systems, or technology, or politics.
In the weblog, Giles has an interesting proposal for a service that would convert mailing lists to newsfeeds and back, along the lines of Aaron Swartz’ rss2email utility, but operated as a web service accessible to non-hackers.
Nice idea, but vulnerable to the type of performance woes that afflict popular free services.
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