My Friday morning chuckle...

As a consequence of setting up an MSN Messenger IM account for work, I now have my very first Hotmail account. Not that I really wanted one. I don't use a Microsoft email program (necessary for POP3 access) and I simply don't like webmail (I prefer to read email from all my accounts in one place).

Anyway, this morning when I logged into MSN Messenger with Trillian, I received a notification that I had new mail. When I checked my inbox, however, it turned out to be just a periodic Hotmail "Member Communication" (i.e., spam) filled with information I hadn't asked for and didn't want.

As I always do when I receive self-promotion emails from an otherwise reputable source, I checked the bottom of the message for the obligatory unsubscribe link (or to use the parlance of many companies, the "Change Your Marketing Preferences" link). The fine print began with standard enough language:

As a Hotmail member, you have received this e-mail to inform you of updates, changes to the Hotmail service, or special news and information from MSN. Our policy is to send e-mail messages only to announce such information, and we’ll continue to honor this policy.

The next sentence, however, may be the best example I have ever seen of a company telling its users/patrons/customers to go fly a kite:

Free Hotmail users: If you do not wish to receive Hotmail member letters, you may close your Hotmail account.

Should libraries adopt similar attitudes? Should we begin sending our patrons unsolicited email updates? And when they complain, should we then offer them a single option -- canceling their library cards?

Isn't it about time we retired this technology:

I created several IM accounts yesterday for use at work, and every single time I had to contend with one of these awful, awful forms, regardless of whose IM service I was registering to use. I think I may have typed the "word" correctly about 50% of the time. On one form it took me 4 tries to get it right.

I understand the purpose behind these forms (I even used one on another blog I run for a while -- until I found an easier solution), but there has got to be a better way to enforce security for these services. How about a tool like Bad Behavior? When it works properly, a web user never even knows it's there. And it works beautifully.

If MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! really wanted people using their web services, wouldn't they ditch these forms?

Last night, I witnessed a fine example of the web's power for current awareness and knowledge management...

I attended a local meeting for new and prospective members of a national organization. As new people walked in, one of the officers asked each person how they had heard about the meeting. It seems she had sent out over 200 postcard invitations for the meeting and was curious as to the mail campaign's effectiveness. Well, of the 20 or 30 of us in attendance, only one said they had received a postcard. The rest of us all said we had heard about the meeting from the group's website, a fact that seemed to genuinely surprise her.

The most notable thing of all was that this was not a uniformly young group of people. All age groups were represented, and the age of the person appeared to have little or no influence on how they had learned about the meeting.

Something to think about for librarians weighing the value of a print newsletter of library news versus a blog with the same information. The blog solution offers a far more portable, convenient, and enduring solution. After all, most people will toss their print newsletter after a quick read, but if the information is posted to a blog, that same person can refer to the information today, tomorrow, next month,and next year.

Last week, the New York Times published a story about the rise of instant messaging within corporate culture:

Years ago, when PC's were spreading through corporations, many companies eliminated secretaries on the theory that the machines would enable professionals to do their own typing and send their own messages by e-mail. But phishing attacks, viruses and spam have clogged e-mail networks, and voice-mail boxes are also overflowing.

Now a generation of office workers who grew up with instant messaging has gained control. They have made I.M. the new black, the latest trend in information technology. Along the way, they have changed how the corporate world converses and have built a series of new communication applications.

Granted, most of the examples included in the story involve technology companies, settings that tend to be early adopters of bleeding edge trends. But it would be foolish to dismiss the story's importance on that fact alone.

In a presentation on instant messaging at last month's Computers in Libraries conference, librarian and Walking Paper blogger Aaron Schmidt cited a poll that found that young people view email as a way to communicate with "old people." For today's high school and college students, IM and text messaging are the preferred method of communication. Email and telephones? Forget about it.

Why is this so important for law libraries? Because this generation of plugged in youth will soon become the law students and lawyers who make up our primary patron base. Perhaps more importantly, they'll eventually become law school faculty members. If we can't talk to them in the forum they prefer, they'll look elsewhere for help. They'll ask their classmates, their colleagues, friends at other law schools, or (gasp!) librarians at other institutions who ARE making an effort to adopt patron-friendly methods of communication.

Tulsa, North Carolina, and Widener are just three examples of law school libraries already making such an effort. For an example from the world of court libraries, check out the Massachusetts Trial Courts Law Libraries.

[NY Times] I.M. Generation Is Changing the Way Business Talks