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This email is bloggable

May 12, 2009 by 2 Comments

Last month I got an email from Jonathan Berger, whom I had met briefly at NY Tech Meetup several months back. He just launched an online vintage marketplace called Market Publique and wanted to spread the news (I’ve already bought two items from it and it’s actually pretty rad).

I get a lot of emails from a lot of people who want to promote this or that, but it was one line at the bottom just below the signature that made this email stand out from the rest.

This email is:     [*] bloggable     [ ] ask first       [ ] private

Since in fact Jonathan marked his email as bloggable, here I am blogging about it when I probably never would have thought to otherwise. It’s a clever device for mass mailings and a genius marketing tactic.

I wanted to give Jonathan all of the credit for coming up with this indicator, but after doing a bit of Google research, I discovered that others are doing it as well. Chris Messina a.k.a. FactoryJoe does it, Sean Bonner does it. I tracked down the originator to be Ross Mayfield who included it in his signature for the first time in 2002. It’s surprising that it’s been around for so long and, despite getting around 200 emails a day, I’ve managed to never see it until now.

I’m probably going to steal the idea whenever I announce something major via email — which given my move towards Twitter and away from email I don’t see myself doing any time soon, but you never know.

This blog post is: [*] bloggable [ ] ask first [ ] private

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About

Whitney Hess is a coach and writer helping product teams and senior leaders make better decisions through the principles of user experience. She believes empathy builds empires.

Follow @whitneyhess

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  • http://shimone.info iamshimone

    I've seen this before but it never really took off. I wonder if it's because of assumptions (right or wrong) that anything accessed via the internet is public domain and therefore bloggable, shareable, etc. with or without permission. People are expected to use their best judgment and from what I can tell it's working out :)

    To your point though, the “bloggable” asterisk does work as a handy suggestion :)

  • http://www.waltribeiro.net Walt Ribeiro

    This is awesome! At first I thought it was a plugin… or a startup idea from an email company – but its simply an added text you send out to your receivers. This is a great because from a world that is starting to be open and creative commons, etc, this is a good way to share things, too.