best_practices

  • What to do before forwarding urgent warnings (or great news) by email

    Every now and then, people find in their inbox some email that would have been much better not to send. I’m not talking about spam. I refer to those “urgent warnings” about some danger, or to all those wonderful or scandalous “news” that some well meaning friend sends or forward to everybody in his address book because it only takes one click and “this is big, everybody gotta know it!”

    Whenever you have one of these messages in your hands, do yourself and the whole human race a favour

  • Freeing cities from cars? Stranger things have already happened

    (this is from an email I wrote to somebody around 2003. We aren’t there yet, but it’s interesting to see that lots of the pieces to make what’s described below happen are already in place, even if in ways I’d have not imagined back then) Let’s make cities with more condos, to save space and energy. With lots of city parks, locally administered. Above all, with cars out of the way.

  • I d rather turn on my TV, not my modem

    This is something I just found in my email backups of the 90’s, when ADSL wasn’t available as today. Replace “mailing lists” with “the Internet” and it still makes sense in these times of attacks to Net Neutrality: ...please do NOT send to public mailing lists messages with fancy GIF backgrounds, stilish business cards, etc... This practice doesn't provide any additional information, and only wastes bandwidth. Besides, if I wanted to be brainwashed by nice pictures, trendy music and off-topic animations, I'd rather turn on my TV, not my modem

  • Do you know what links you send to your friends?

    Whenever we find interesting Web pages via Rss or aggregators like Google Reader, our natural reaction is to signal them to all our friends and colleagues who may be interested. Sometimes we do this by sending the same links to those pages that we found in the aggregator or Rss reader via email. Other popular options are pasting the links on our Facebook wall or feed them to some URL shortener for Twitter.