Like AOL CDs, Hamsterdance and Geocities, the email newsletter once felt like a quaint relic of the early days of the internet. But following the trail blazed by animated gifs, it seems to be making something of a comeback.
You can pin the trend of the confluence on three factors. The first is that email is usable again. Five years ago, our email inboxes were a disaster zone -- stuffed with male enlargement products, Nigerian princes and Myspace notifications. But the combined efforts of spam filters, inbox zero principles and smart categorisation tools are finally bearing fruit and our inboxes are becoming both manageable and accessible anywhere we go.
The second is that newsletters are finite. On the web, we're forced into a confrontation with infinity on an hourly basis -- Facebook and
Twitter are designed to scroll forever, surfacing older and older posts as you descend their ziggurats.
Follow just a handful of people, and you'll never hit the bottom.
Finally, there's the death of RSS. Once upon a time, if you wanted to communicate regularly with a medium-sized group of people, you'd start a blog and your readers would keep track of the blogs they followed through an RSS reader. When Google shuttered its Reader product, hundreds of replacements sprung up -- but none have stemmed the slow decline of RSS as a technology. Today, seeing an RSS button on a website is as rare as a Flash animation.
That's why newsletters are back. They're finite and manageable, guaranteed to be seen, and accessible on any device.
They're also increasingly personal -- written by some of the web's favourite curators, rather than faceless corporate entities. If you'd like to dig in, here are ten of our favourites that you can subscribe to today for free.
Dan Hon's Extenuating Circumstances
Dan Hon, who founded Six to Start, has been writing his newsletter on technology and media news for almost a year. The frequency varies somewhat, but his insights into what's going on are invaluable to anyone working on the web.
Get the latest productivity tools, apps and web toys, curated by a crowd of early adopters, in your inbox before anyone else gets their hands on them. Sign up and you can also submit your own suggestions.
Rusty Foster's collection of the contents of his browser at the end of the day turned the computer programmer into a Newsweek columnist almost overnight. It's snarky, makes obscure references and is full of hyperlinks -- but is perfect for those situations when you open Twitter, find everyone's shouting about something, and need to catch up fast.
WIRED contributor Maria Popova publishes a weekly newsletter of the most unmissable articles that she's come across -- from art and design to science and history. It's not just beautifully written, but also beautifully illustrated.
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil publishes a daily newsletter covering the latest breakthroughs in medicine, biotechnology, nanotechnology, computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, and more. If you want to find out what Google's going to be working on next, there's no better place to get hints.
Kate Solomon's Some Songs That I Like
Stuck for something new to listen to? Music and technology writer Kate Solomon's weekly newsletter always has a recommendation that you'll want to hear.
Alexis Madrigal's Five Intriguing Things
The Atlantic's deputy editor Alexis Madrigal has a newsletter that delivers five brain-expanding nuggets of information to your inbox every weekday. Brief, and fascinating.
Ed Yong's The Ed's UpScience writer and WIRED contributor Ed Yong is a must-follow on Twitter for links and opinion about the latest scientific discoveries, and his weekly newsletter is no different. Expect ample helpings of controversial chemicals, contagious diseases and creepy-crawlies.
Every morning, Dave Pell visits about 50 news sites and pulls out the most interesting stories to share with his newsletter subscribers. Don't miss, if only for the the occasional long-form essay thrown in alongside important topics of the day.
Mini-AIRFinally, it'd be wrong to exclude the monthly newsletter from the folks behind the annual Ig Nobel awards. The Mini-Annals-of-Improbable-Research showcases the weirdest scientific discoveries around the world, and also doles out prizes for limericks. Because why not?
Those are some of our favourites, but there are more newsletters in the world than stars in the sky. Actually, that's not true. Regardless, if you've got a favourite newsletter of your own, don't keep it to yourself. Tell everyone! Starting in the comments section below.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
