Like others, I am trying to scale down my e-mail usage. See "Tantek's post on e-mail being e-fail":http://tantek.com/log/2008/02.html#d19t2359. I have put up this page to help you communicate with me easier.
h1. Communication Mediums I Like
- *IRC* is one of my favourite mediums of communication. It's fun, allows people to _afk_ and has a very good signal:noise ratio. It also de-bullshits people - you are no longer the CEO/Head Honcho/Vice-Chancellor/Prime Minister - you are just a string of characters and whatever reputation has built up around those. I am tommorris on irc.freenode.net and hang out on channels I am interested in - #microformats, #swig, #geekdinner, #git, #github, #foaf etc. I also have channels for specific events - if I blog or tweet about an IRC channel, you can bet I'm on there.
- *IM* is good too. My preferred network is _Jabber/XMPP_ (over GTalk), although I also have accounts on AIM, Yahoo! MSN, Facebook and LiveJournal.
- *Twitter*
h1. Communication Mediums I Don't Like
- *E-mail* is a huge time suck, and it's a viral time suck. Because it encourages other bad practices, it spreads evil far and wide.
- *Facebook* and *MySpace*. I'm only on them because it's socially expected. I don't actually _like_ them.
- *Telephone* and *voicemail*. I'm perhaps one of the few people on the planet to have a voicemail warning rather than a greeting. That's because it costs me money to get voicemail, and I don't get it very quickly. I would much prefer almost any other mechanism than phone. It's really intrusive. If someone phones me, I have to drop whatever I'm doing and answer it. And people seem to have extremely short attention spans. If I don't answer my phone in two rings, you ring off, and then I'm forced to play telephone tag with you. Be patient.
h1. How to communicate efficiently
* Speak to me like a human being, not like a "tosser":http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tosser .
* Don't waste my time - get to the point quickly.
* Don't equivocate, use "logical fallacies":http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ , lie or attempt to befuddle me with marketese.
* DO put things on the Internet, and give me a URI. Giving something a URI "makes it useful":http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/HTTP-URI.html in a way that putting it in an e-mail does not.
** For photos, put them up on "Flickr":http://flickr.com/ .
** For events, put them up on "Upcoming":http://upcoming.yahoo.com .
** For data, put it in an RDF file and put it up on the net.
** For almost everything else, get a blog and post them there.
* Tell me what I need to do. It should take me less than about five seconds to figure out what I actually have to do, otherwise it goes to the bottom of the queue.
* "Don't top post":http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html .
* Don't send me large attachments.
* Don't send me Microsoft Office files.
* Don't send me files in complex formats when simple ones exist. ASCII, HTML, simple XML formats and so on are preferred over PDF and large graphics.
* Don't expect immediate responses. I do other things than just respond to your e-mails.
h1. Suggested practices
- On conference announcements, put them up on the Web and then send a very abbreviated version to the mailing list. That way, you aren't cluttering up my inbox - and I can forward them on to other people without using e-mail.