Comments on: The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community

By: Dashboarding activity on public JISCMail lists using Google Sheets (Spreadsheets) JISC CETIS MASHe

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:33:16 +0000

[...] forward but as the output might be of benefit to other people like Brian Kelly who reported the Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community I wondered if there was a better way of doing it. Here’s my [...]

By: Tools to Support a Community of Practice « UK Web Focus

Tools to Support a Community of Practice « UK Web Focus — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 08:01:22 +0000

[...] (CoP) through 16 years of the IWMW event and, in the early years, engagement on mailing lists. As described previously the two main lists used by this community have declined significantly since 2002, and now are used [...]

By: referencement local

referencement local — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 01:54:22 +0000

referencement local…

[...]The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community « UK Web Focus[...]…

By: The (Technology) Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present and Christmas Yet To Come « UK Web Focus

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:32:35 +0000

[...] June 2010 a post on The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community documented evidence on 10 years use of two JISCMail lists which clearly demonstrated the decline [...]

By: New Opportunities for the Institutional Web Management Community « UK Web Focus

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:23:24 +0000

[...] to revisit the online tools which can help to support the community, especially in light of the significant decline in use of the JISCMail lists within the sector? In her plenary talk in the opening session at IWMW 2011 Amber Thomas of the JISC spoke [...]

By: The Web Management Community of Practice « UK Web Focus

The Web Management Community of Practice « UK Web Focus — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 08:07:04 +0000

[...] as reported in a recent survey use of the JISCMail lists have dropped significantly over the past five years. Does this signify [...]

By: Learning Aloud - Are email and email lists (listservs) in decline?

Learning Aloud - Are email and email lists (listservs) in decline? — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 20:43:45 +0000

[...] received a much higher level of traffic than is now the case – Open Source Paleontologist; UK Web Focus. Maybe it is the old-style email only lists that are falling out of favor. A Google Group, for [...]

By: jacqui mulville

jacqui mulville — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 07:46:27 +0000

Hello, I am writing a paper on the use and relevance of my jiscmail list zooarch (a list concerned with the study of animals in the past) that has been running for 11 years now and has steadily increased in membership and messages but not in direct proportion. We are seeing a number of changes in message types which I attribute to changes in technology, e.g. pdfs not photocopies and the treasure trove that is our archive also the list now is so large (about 1000 folk from 45 countries) that people do not want to ask ‘stupid questions’ anymore. I am interested in any other parallel changes on other lists. Has anyone else reviewed their lists and their usage? We do have a breakaway facebook style group for younger folk this is minorly sucessful, but no one uses RSS to my knowledge. I have stats about messages versus members if anyone is interested.

By: Are Mailing Lists Now Primarily A Broadcast Medium? « UK Web Focus

Are Mailing Lists Now Primarily A Broadcast Medium? « UK Web Focus — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:01:44 +0000

[...] analysis followed previously surveys which were described in a post on The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community as illustrated in the accompanying [...]

By: Will #Quora Be Big In 2011? « UK Web Focus

Will #Quora Be Big In 2011? « UK Web Focus — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 10:11:45 +0000

[...] the decline in usage of mailing lists by those involved in Web management and Web development. In response to an early post Virginia Knight suggested that “many email lists to have a natural life-cycle ending with [...]

By: Is Stack Overflow Useful for Web Developers? « UK Web Focus

Is Stack Overflow Useful for Web Developers? « UK Web Focus — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:18:12 +0000

[...] by Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) on 7 October 2010 A couple of months ago I reported on The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community. Virginia Knight responded by commenting that “many email lists to have a natural life-cycle [...]

By: “When The Axe Man Cometh” – the Future of Institutional Web Teams « UK Web Focus

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:14:37 +0000

[...] and website-info-mgt JISCMail lists. But the IWMW event only takes place annually and, as described previously, discussions of the JISCMail lists have declined significantly over the past 5 [...]

By: Virginia Knight

Virginia Knight — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:33:30 +0000

‘the majority of lists no longer have any traffic’.

I think it’s the way of many email lists to have a natural life-cycle ending with dormancy. JISCMail has been going for 10 years; when it took over from Mailbase, only currently active lists would have been transferred to it, so since then you would expect the proportion of dormant lists to have risen.

Virginia Knight

By: Revisiting Web Team Blogs « UK Web Focus

Revisiting Web Team Blogs « UK Web Focus — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:30:53 +0000

[...] it time the Web community acknowledges that following the steady demise of JISCMail lists as a valuable resource for the community that providing a team blog and ensuring that it is part of a national index can be valuable both to [...]

By: David Kane

David Kane — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:17:22 +0000

Google wave seems to occupy a middle ground between email and some of the other forms of communication/collaboration out there. Fresh and ground-breaking as it is, I am surprised that it has not made more of an impact than it has so far.

By: Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus)

Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 08:03:41 +0000

Hi Joy. Thanks for the comment – and it is good to have some evidence to inform such discussions. I note that you said that “email overwhelmingly outnumbered RSS as the preferred means of delivering research updates“. The context of my post was use of mailing lists to support discussions within communities. So I don’t think we are necessarily in disagreement – I don’t think anyone is suggesting that JISCMail lists should be used for delivering research updates from services such as Zetoc.

By: Graham Robinson

Graham Robinson — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:40:24 +0000

Personally, I wonder if these numbers will rise slightly when Universities move to Outlook 2010 and have conversation view, making email lists look a lot more organised and more like RSS feeds.

By: joy

joy — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:42:39 +0000

You’ve posted this just as I am mulling over what we quite do with some of the feedback we’ve got through market research for some of our services. If some of this feedback is correct, then I’d say that the library community is much more in synch with the research community in its use of email as a communications channel than ‘we’ are (whoever that ‘we’ is). When we surveyed Zetoc users, email overwhelmingly outnumbered RSS as the preferred means of delivering research updates. When we recently did focus groups with new postgrads *very* few used personalisation tools & could not see the value (not immediately). Again, they said they would prefer email.
So who’s out of synch? It would be tempting to just cast these people as unenlightened and stuck in the past, but I don’t think so.

I’m not advocating email as *the* most effective means to communicate & share ideas, or any for that matter, but I think we need to be careful about casting it as some sort of old fashioned and ‘non-interactive’ mode of communicating. I can be a passive consumer of twitter or a blog just as much as any other medium, and be ‘interactive’ with email. It depends on the context. Email is probably the most single important technology I use on a day-to-day basis. It’s utterly embedded. Diminishing trends highlight what you’ve said — that conversation is also happening elsewhere. But email still dominates for most, and I suspect for a long time.