I own two e-mail lists, FYA (For Your Amusement), a joke list sent out at wildly irregular intervals, and WIST (Wish I’d Said That), a quote-a-day list from my quotations database.
I started FYA two, three, four years back when I realized that I was sending out jokes to a larger and larger group of friends and family, and thought it would be a lot more convenient to let a listserv company handle it. At the time, there were several free ones. Now there’s pretty much just one, Topica, who I’ve been using for both FYA and WIST.
Now, Topica does a pretty good job. It has good configuration options. It’s pretty stable. No complaints. Except that, in order to keep their business model going, they’ve started inserting ads at the top and bottom of their “free” lists.
I have no philosophical problem with this. It’s their business, their model, and they aren’t charging me diddly-squat.
But I have an aesthetic problem. The ads are ugly. They detract. They clash and intrude and just look plain awful. If I didn’t have any other choice, I’d put up with it. It is free, after all.
So it turns out that I do have a choice. My host account with Hosting Matters gives me two mailing lists through MailMan, which interface I’m already familiar with through another list I’m a manager for.
So I transferred everything over tonight. Woo-hoo.
But that’s not what I’m here to blog about.
I mentioned I started FYA to send jokes to family and friends.
There are 39 addresses there. I recognize about half of them.
WIST has 58 members. I recognize only a handful.
“But, Dave,” you say, “you run a blog. You’re used to broadcasting your innermost thoughts out to a bunch of strangers.”
But that’s anonymous. Only if they choose to comment do they become real people. And then they’re real people.
It’s just interesting to actually see a list of people, strangers, who have an interest in content I choose to provide. Vaguely disturbing, vaguely pleasing, but definitely … interesting.
And if you want to, you are of course welcome to subscribe to either FYA or WIST. Or both, if you’re particularly daring.