Publishing Your Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 278

Now let's look at a more Internet-oriented solution: using a mailing list to
broadcast your research.

Publishing to a Mailing List

If you're doing research that's ongoing, or you don't want to go to the trouble of
creating and organizing an entire Web site, you may want to consider publish-
ing to a mailing list. It doesn't need to cost you anything; there are plenty of free
mailing list services out there to which you can publish your research.

pros
. Getting your information out there is as easy as writing an e-mail
message. You don't have to worry about fancy formatting, or page
creation, or anything like that.

People can get updates to your research in e-mail instead of having to
remember to visit your site (or put a page monitor on it).

.

You might ind it easier to incorporate sending out a regular e-mail
into your routine than updating a Web site.

.

People who don't have particularly fast connections can download a
plain-text e-mail far faster than they can visit a Web site.

.

cons
.

If you want to add fancy content to a Web site (like Flash media,
audio, and polls), you won't ind plain-text e-mails useful.

It can be diicult to organize information within a mailing list.
. So many people have spam traps nowadays you may ind that your
information is not getting to them or you may be accused of being a
spammer. It's amazing how oten this can happen—people will forget
they subscribed to a list, have someone who shares e-mail with them
subscribe to a list, not want to bother to learn how to unsubscribe so
they take a shortcut by accusing you of spamming, and so on.
. Having to administer a mailing list can be time consuming and tedious.

.

It's sometimes diicult for someone who wants to learn more about
your research to visit a mailing list archive in order to get up to speed.

.