Meta-mail. In an item entitled personal message deflection,
Phil Windley says he'd like to move his process-related communication
out of email and into task-oriented software. Here's the glitch:
One problem with moving
from a single general purpose tool like email to multiple special
purpose tools is split focus. To understand what I mean, think about
RSS. RSS has reduced the number of mailing lists I subscribe to and
consequently reduced my email traffic. Perfect application, except that
now I have to remember to fire up my feed reader in addition to my mail
client. I generally treat it as lower priority and so I'm reluctant to
get high-priority information delivered by RSS. What happens when there
are a dozen special purpose tools managing my workflow instead of just
a linear email list? [Phil Windley's Enterprise Computinging Weblog]
Indeed. This is why I've always thought that structured interpersonal
messages would turn out to be at least as important as (and maybe more
important than) structured interprocess messages. John Reynolds, blogging about Esther Dyson's meta-mail concept (which Phil's post also alludes to), has a great example:
… [Jon's Radio]