Mostly because i am just lazy and only looked at the last report :-) All of the data is publicly available here: http://www.mu.jisc.ac.uk/servicedata/jiscmail/.

Thanks for your response.

You are, of course, correct in saying that I am an early adopter of various communications and collaboration technologies. But just as when I promoted the Web to an initially sceptical audience who were convinced that Gopher was the future back in 1993, sometimes early adopters correctly identify significant trends ahead of the game! These observations were intended to reflect trends in the Web management community. As you say some communities are satisfied users of mailing lists – and I am on JISCMail lists for museums and public libraries which are definitely thriving.

I would say, though, that use of more open environments (such as blogs and Twitter) enable ideas and topics discussed in mailing lists to be more easily accessed by people who chose not to subscribe to such lists – for example I would not be interested in joining one of your Shibboleth lists but I do find your blog keeps me informed of developments and your tweets allow be to easily find out about new resources and participate in amplified events.

Your figures showing a 9% increase in Q4 2008/09 as compared to Q4 2007/08 are interesting – but why are only these two quarters cited? It occurs to me that if such statistics were published openly this might provide a useful resources for developers to data mine.

Of course such statistics should be treated with caution. For example every few weeks I go to my JISCMail-errors email folder and delete hundreds of messages were had failed to be delivered (are such figures included in the statistics); I receive JISCMail messages from a significant numbers of lists delivered to a GMail account so that, potentially I can search across such lists in ways not possible using the JISCMail search facility (in reality I have not accessed this account for a long time, so the delivery statistics are misleading); etc.

I think that it depends on a number of factors:

1. Type of user. By the nature of your work, you are likely to be an early adopter of new communication technologies, and so are your audience. However, say, a list on Children’s Literature is not likely to see a significant number of people choosing twitter over mailing lists. I don’t know the typical demographic of jiscmail users but i would imagine a large percentage are in the ‘non-early adopter’ category.

2. Currency of topic. The JISC-Shibboleth list has shown a steady growth in use and it is rare when a day goes by without it being used. At the moment the discussion is mostly around migration to shib2 – obviously a very current topic.

3. Type of list. as you note, some lists are supporting active communities, whilst others just serve as announcement lists. Some lists start off as one and slide in to others, hence a decrease in traffic.

I think all of these factors have an impact. JISC Monitoring Unit reports a 9% increase in messages delivered by JISCmail in Q4 2008/09 as compared to Q4 2007/08 – so the service continues to show no sign of plateau or decline.

I think this demonstrates that the significant drop in JISCMail usage is reflected in the wider community (although I should add that I have not checked these figures carefully).