Like AOL CDs, Hamsterdance and Geocities, the email
newsletter once felt like a quaint relic of the early days of the
internet. But following the trail blazed by animated gifs, it seems to be making something of a
comeback.
You can pin the trend of the confluence on three
factors. The first is that email is usable again. Five years ago,
our email inboxes were a disaster zone -- stuffed with male
enlargement products, Nigerian princes and Myspace notifications. But the combined efforts
of spam filters, inbox
zero principles and smart categorisation tools are finally bearing fruit and our
inboxes are becoming both manageable and accessible anywhere we
go.
The second is that newsletters are finite. On the web, we're forced into a confrontation with
infinity on an hourly basis -- Facebook and
Twitter are designed to scroll forever,
surfacing older and older posts as you descend their ziggurats.
Follow just a handful of people, and you'll never hit the
bottom.
Finally, there's the death of RSS. Once upon a time,
if you wanted to communicate regularly with a medium-sized group of
people, you'd start a blog and your readers would keep track of the
blogs they followed through an RSS reader. When Google shuttered its Reader product, hundreds of replacements sprung
up -- but none have stemmed the slow decline of RSS as a technology. Today, seeing an RSS button on a
website is as rare as a Flash animation.
That's why newsletters are back. They're finite and
manageable, guaranteed to be seen, and accessible on any device.
They're also increasingly personal -- written by some of the web's
favourite curators, rather than faceless corporate entities. If
you'd like to dig in, here are ten of our favourites that you can
subscribe to today for free.
Dan
Hon's Extenuating Circumstances
Dan Hon, who founded Six to
Start, has been writing his newsletter on technology and media
news for almost a year. The frequency varies somewhat, but his
insights into what's going on are invaluable to anyone working on
the web.
Product
Hunt
Get the latest productivity tools, apps and web toys, curated by a
crowd of early adopters, in your inbox before anyone else gets
their hands on them. Sign up and you can also submit your own
suggestions.
Rusty Foster's Today in
Tabs
Rusty Foster's collection of the contents of his browser at the end
of the day turned the computer programmer into a Newsweek columnist
almost overnight. It's snarky, makes obscure references and is full
of hyperlinks -- but is perfect for those situations when you open
Twitter, find everyone's shouting about something, and need to
catch up fast.
Maria Popova's
Brainpickings
WIRED contributor Maria Popova publishes a weekly newsletter of the
most unmissable articles that she's come across -- from art and
design to science and history. It's not just beautifully written,
but also beautifully illustrated.
Ray Kurzweil's
Accelerating Intelligence
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil publishes a daily newsletter
covering the latest breakthroughs in medicine, biotechnology,
nanotechnology, computer science, information technology,
artificial intelligence, and more. If you want to find out what
Google's going to be working on next, there's no better place to
get hints.
Kate
Solomon's Some Songs That I Like
Stuck for something new to listen to? Music and technology writer
Kate Solomon's weekly newsletter always has a recommendation that
you'll want to hear.
Alexis Madrigal's
Five Intriguing Things
The Atlantic's deputy editor Alexis Madrigal has a newsletter that
delivers five brain-expanding nuggets of information to your inbox
every weekday. Brief, and fascinating.
Ed
Yong's The Ed's Up
Science writer and WIRED contributor Ed Yong is a must-follow
on Twitter for links and opinion about the latest scientific
discoveries, and his weekly newsletter is no different. Expect
ample helpings of controversial chemicals, contagious diseases and
creepy-crawlies.
Dave Pell's
Next Draft
Every morning, Dave Pell visits about 50 news sites and pulls out
the most interesting stories to share with his newsletter
subscribers. Don't miss, if only for the the occasional long-form
essay thrown in alongside important topics of the day.
Mini-AIR
Finally, it'd be wrong to exclude the monthly newsletter from
the folks behind the annual Ig Nobel awards. The
Mini-Annals-of-Improbable-Research showcases the weirdest
scientific discoveries around the world, and also doles out prizes
for limericks. Because why not?
Those are some of our favourites, but there are
more newsletters in the world than stars in the sky. Actually,
that's not true. Regardless, if you've got a favourite newsletter
of your own, don't keep it to yourself. Tell everyone! Starting in
the comments section below.
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-01/01/the-return-of-the-newsletter http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/k_n/newsletter1.jpg
The return of the newsletter
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