Some interesting discussion in The Wired Campus has caught my eye today, mainly because I feel a little guilty pushing this particular blog into a space that until now has been comfortably owned by the AAIR DWSIG mailing list, gamely coordinated by University of South Australia.
Some professors are unsubscribing from scholarly e-mail lists because they say that discussion has shifted to academic blogs, to social networks like Facebook, and to Twitter
The article, Are Scholarly E-Mail Lists Fading in an Era of Blogs and Twitter?, was prompted by another at the end of last month entitled Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance. It has certainly sparked some debate.
Nowadays, there seem to be so many ways to get the information I’m interested in or the answers I need but not all these methods encourage sharing and collaboration in the way a traditional mailing list does. We use several within the IT department at UNE, for general communication with the BI/DW community, for our Agile Development group and within our own team for ETL notification and they are highly effective for ‘push’ communication. So I don’t think email lists have had their day, but I think two-way discussion that to date has only been able to happen through that medium may well now have found another home.
