Email Backlash 2.0Sep26

Brian Mulvaney 0 comments

Tuesday's "Cubicle Culture" column in the Wall Street Journal (subscriber only link) has an amusing take on occupational spam. "Like bad advice, self-importance and ugly carpeting, there's just too much of it in the office", Jared Sandberg writes. "Email Backlash 2.0's features include an overtendency to send it, an inability to respond to it, and a conversation slower than smoke signals." Interviewee Stephen Jukuri notes that regular old spam now feels like a blessing since he can, "Delete, Delete, Delete" without a second thought. (This coming from a man with over six hundred stale emails in a folder called "Limbo".) Jukuri goes on to observe, "We've reached the too-much--information age, but we really haven't reached the communication age".

The column reports that the declining utility of email in the workplace is leading workers to reach for a trusty old technology: the telephone...

And on the subject of the telephone, elsewhere in Tuesday's WSJ, Lee Gomes writes of how LiveOffice Corp put a podcasting set of wheels on their existing teleconferencing service. CEO Alexander Rusich explains how it came about:

"Teleconferencing was one of our services. Then people would ask us, "Can we record these conferences?" From there, people said, "How do I share this with people who couldn't come to the meetings?" It's a very simple thing to do that via podcasting; you just bolt some software called an "RSS feed" on top of the recorded file, and it's a podcast."

LiveOffice let's you save any of your conference calls as an mp3 file and makes the recording available for subscription as a podcast. There are endless scenarios on why you'd want a podcast of an audio conference: to cover participants who weren't able to attend; remove the need to take notes during a meeting; quarterly investor calls for private companies; record screening interviews of potential recruits to be shared with the hiring team; etc., etc. This is a great little enhancement that highlights the possibilities for time shifting existing services and making them available for subscription via RSS.