"Hey, what's your fax number?"
You don't have one, do you? Oh sure, maybe there's a fax machine at your office and you can look up the number on your company website when someone says they need to send you a fax. Once upon a time, faxes were the latest thing. Now they are so second-millennium. Back in the 90s, I wrote a little ditty of a poem entitled "Revere the Modern":
Today if we protested levies on tea
and needed to warn of attacks,
we'd send an email and the message would be:
one if by phone, two if by fax.
Dated, dated, dated.
The same will soon be said, I hope, about references to email. Yeah, it was just fine in its day, but then the spam and the porn took over and all the cool kids migrated to IM and weblogs and other such modern technologies.
"Hey, what's your email address?"
"Gosh, I don't know, let me look it up for you..."
Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But as previously noted, I'm working hard to eliminate the scourge of email from my own life. Stowe Boyd has taken note and late this afternoon we had a good conversation (via Jabber, of course) about how to become email-free. One intriguing idea is what he calls "conversation blogs" -- one-to-one weblogs where two people can have a productive conversation far from the slum that is email (with RSS/ATOM feeds to keep your conversation partner in the loop, naturally). I said "conversation blog" isn't very catchy, so on the spot he christened them "diablogs". Putting his money where his mouth is, Stowe promptly set up a diablog for the two of us on TypePad. We're going to explore this new medium and see if it can save the world, or at least our sanity. Stay tuned!