Overview

Arguably the internet has had its major impact through electronic mail (email) rather than graphic rich, Flash-infested web sites. This profile points to resources regarding email.

It covers some technical aspects of messaging, including Short Message Services (SMS) - delivery of short texts to mobile phones and other devices. It highlights academic and market studies. And it points to writing about online communities, bulletin boards and newsgroups. There's a separate profile on web logs (blogs), an electronic publishing genre that combines the ease of email and the potentially global exposure of web pages.

We'll be adding material in the final quarter of 2001.

     content of this profile

The following pages cover:

Email - technical primers, regulatory issues (in particular spam, defamation, copyright and privacy), hoaxes and developments such as ENUM and Rich Media

SMS and IMS - writing about Short Message Services (SMS) and Instant Messaging Services (IMS) including pointers to use of SMS for advertising and claims that it's underpinned 'people power' in some emerging economies

Communities - newsgroups, chat, netiquette, moderation and issues such as defamation

Newsletters - managing email newsletters

Statistics - data about the volume and use (or abuse) of email

Most issues of Analysphere, our weekly online newsletter, point to new studies, legislation and figures about email and connectivity.

     background

For a general introduction we recommend Jacob Palme's Electronic Mail (Norwood, Artech House 95) and his more self-congratulatory paper The Future of Email. Andrew Odlyzko's characteristically perceptive 2001 paper Content is Not King suggests that connectivity - in particular email - is the 'killer app' until a new infrastructure allows large-scale access to rich media applications such as Video on Demand.

A 2001 Industry Standard article offered a short, rather whimsical history of the '@' symbol, highlighting differing metaphors in various countries. Five countries characterise it simply as the 'at sign'; others see it as an animal or food.

Germans for example see it as a monkey tail. In French ("petit escargot"), Italian ("chiocciola") and Esperanto ("heliko") it's a snail. The Swedes supposedly characterise it as the cinnamon bun ("kanelbulle"), Hungarians as a worm, Chinese as a little mouse, Czechs as the rolled pickled herring and Norwegians as a pig's tail. The Finns win the prize with "miukumauku" - the "sign of the meow" - inspired by a curled-up, sleeping cat.

There is a more rigorous account in Karl-Erik Tallmo's essay Where It's @, highlighted in the Typography page of our Print profile.




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