In this RedMonk conversation, Dan Moore, principal product engineer at FusionAuth, join James Governor, principal analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, and Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk, to discuss the resurgence of newsletters as a tool for authentic expression and community engagement. They explore the importance of optimizing existing content, the power of voice, and best practices for creating effective newsletters. The discussion highlights the evolving landscape of digital communication and the role newsletters play in fostering relationships and sharing knowledge.
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Transcript
Kate Holterhoff
Hello and welcome to this RedMonk Conversation. My name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at RedMonk and co -hosting with me today is James Governor, Principal Analyst and Co -Founder of RedMonk. And today we are joined by our esteemed return guest, Dan Moore, Principal Product Engineer at FusionAuth. Dan, I am so glad you were able to come back on the show.
Dan Moore
Thanks for inviting me back.
Kate Holterhoff
so last time Dan recorded with James and I… We did it in a video but this time we are pivoting to our audio only format, which is the MonkCast, of course, mainly to keep James from pointing out my bluish skin tone, which was a main topic of conversation last time.
James Governor
You’re looking a little bit healthier today, I must say, you’ve got to… little…
Kate Holterhoff
A rosier glow.
James Governor
A bit of a healthier glow. I’m not so worried about that you’re going to be…You’re going be telling me that you’ve got consumption and you
Kate Holterhoff
Exactly. Tuberculosis. I’m hoping it was a camera setting issue rather than evidence of a vitamin D deficiency. But I am absolutely digressing here. So James, why don’t you kick us off on part two of what is now our ongoing series, which I am provisionally entitling RedMonk Grills Dan Moore.
James Governor
RedMonk Grills Dan Moore.
Dan Moore
I’m here for that. I’m here for that.
James Governor
That definitely sounds very Midwest. So yes, I think that Dan has a lot of interesting reckons. Last time he was on the show, we were talking about Hacker News and the social currency of that platform.
One of the other, yeah, we think about the things that we can use as tools in our daily work, in communicating with technical audiences. Yeah, there’s another one out there and that is the, you know, just the towering, towering, I don’t know what it’s towering, but it’s big, the newsletter. Newsletters seem like they were going the way of the dodo a few years ago, like who wants a newsletter?
And then suddenly everyone wanted to have a newsletter. We’re to have newsletters. And I think the key question, I can’t believe that I couldn’t think of a word to come after towering. But anyway, so the thing is, is that we spend a lot of time telling stories, sharing things that we’ve learned, trying to get people interested, helping their learning journeys, all things technology. so there are, and people have different modes of learning.
And it just so happens that obviously the newsletter is one of the mechanisms that people are learning things. also I think, you know, let’s look, let’s talk about, let’s get real for a second. It’s 2024. You know, we’re doing all of this work. And I think we’re all kind of asking ourselves, hang on a minute, we’re doing the work, but how are we gonna make this pay? Because pretty clearly,
We’re all, you we need to sweat the assets. If we’re creating stories, then we better make sure that we have them in the right platforms, that we are reaching multiple different audiences that have different ways of learning. We need to meet people where they are. So newsletters, Dan, what is so great about the towering news?
Dan Moore
Yeah, yeah. Towering edifice?
James Governor
no, that really sounds like something that’s going to fall over.
Dan Moore
yeah. Hopefully not. Hopefully not. Yeah, I I think that
Newsletters are interesting because as you say, they are old technology, right? Like they have newsletters in the eighties, I believe, when email was first invented. But what it does that some other means of distribution don’t do are it reaches people, it’ll place a check all the time and it doesn’t cost anything and it is in your control. And so.
You know, lot of the other options out there give you two out of those three. you know, blogs are in your control and they, do deliver content, but unless you use an RSS reader, which I think probably 0 .1 % of your listeners use an RSS reader. you’re not going to have that chance to reach people where they are and platforms obviously are another option, right? Like your LinkedIn’s, your Twitter slash X’s, etcetera. And there you’re definitely at the mercy of the algorithm and you don’t have any control over that. You build up a hundred thousand followers on X and some Yahoo comes in and buys it. And then the value of those followers decreases according to, how that person or company tweaks the algorithm.
James Governor
So I didn’t know that you were here to upset us today, Dan. I thought we were going to have a good time. Now you’re telling me about X reminded me of Mr. ruin the network.
Dan Moore
sorry, sorry, sorry.
James Governor
Now I’m not in my happy place anymore. Let’s get back to these. I was like, Twitter. I remember it so well. That lovely, lovely platform.
Dan Moore
Yeah. So I think that’s that’s the big win, right? People realizing that there’s value. And I think the other thing about newsletters is they’re super easy to subscribe to, which means they’re super easy to unsubscribe from, which means there’s not kind of like a barrier. so a lot of people, you basically, the content that you write, the content that you create can earn you subscribers in a way that’s similar to the other options, but people are stickier, right? Because again, it arrives in your inbox and I don’t know about you all, but I subscribe to a number of newsletters. Not very many of them I read all the time, but every time I get a newsletter, it rings a bell and you’re building kind of a long -term relationship for lack of a better term when you build out a newsletter.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, Dan, I mean, it’s clear to me that you’ve been thinking a lot about content delivery as it relates to community. And of course, our conversation about Hacker News reflected this. But I am super interested in a blog post that you authored recently entitled, Don’t Let That Content Go to Waste, which really focuses it on the idea of how newsletters can function and maybe how to optimize them for your audience. Can you outline your thesis in this post?
James Governor
You’ve to sweat the assets. That’s the time of day.
Kate Holterhoff
that’s not something that we do in the Midwest. We don’t sweat things. I don’t know. We don’t sweat assets in Ohio.
James Governor
you work hard, you mind your own business, but you don’t sweat the assets.
Kate Holterhoff
Not the Ohioans I’m familiar with, at least. But maybe in my adopted home of Atlanta, there might be a little bit more sweating.
Dan Moore
I think that the reason I wrote this blog post is because I am a member of a lot of different Slack communities or follow people on, again, on some of those platforms that I shall not mention. And I see some great, great content that comes out and great answers, great wisdom. then it just, and then it goes poof away. And even on some, I follow the IETF.
emailing lists around OAuth and things like that. I see some great content there, it especially in Slack, but even in those other places, it just gets lost. And so my point was by picking up and putting it onto a newsletter, you can, and maybe you do some editing, right? Like as most stuff that you, you write off in a Slack, it might not be as polished as you would normally put a newsletter, but you can basically take this,
wisdom exhaust, right? Like it’s like kind of like data exhaust from the early 2000s, but you can like pick it up and put it together. And even if you don’t think you have enough content for a newsletter, I think you do if you are active on those channels and by taking it from these walled gardens of the platforms or slacks or discords and putting it out on it in a newsletter, you do a couple of things. One is you just showcase your knowledge the same way a blog would.
You can deliver it to people. have a low effort way to connect with folks, right? If you ever run into somebody at conference or whatnot, instead of asking them to follow you on something, you can say, Hey, I have a newsletter about real estate in Atlanta, or I have a newsletter about, how developers, are the new Kingmakers or AI or whatever it is. And that’s just a lower ask than some other things. And it will start to build up a.
longer term relationship with anybody that you’re engaged with at low effort to you. So that’s kind of the purpose of the blog post is people are creating all this beautiful content, and it’s just trapped.
James Governor
Especially the stuff in Slack, Slack is like the dark web, Slack, we all put so much effort into communications with our colleagues, and or people in those networks, and then don’t share it externally, Slack is sort of
Yeah, it’s definitely the dark web of, I don’t like the word content, but it is the dark web of content. and, know, it’s, in fact, it’s even worse than that. guess there are search engines for dark web now, but, but Slack is, just, yeah, like those conversations you have internally, don’t become shared and don’t become, you we talk about like one of the, the, if we think about what the certainly grew up in there, the blog near and so on.
It was this idea that you could learn in public and learning in public is really powerful because that means that other people can learn the same things. think our use of Slack has meant that we’re doing a little bit learning in semi -private. And so yeah, it’s interesting this idea that newsletters are an opportunity or a vector for taking some of that and sharing it more broadly and making it useful, sweating the asset.
Kate Holterhoff
I love how you frame it as like a power to the people move of like moving away from platforms that you don’t control to one that you do. Because yeah, you’re right. There is a sort of agnosticism with email. But I do want to push back on the idea that at a conference, if you’re like, hey, subscribe to my newsletter, you know, this is an easier way of making sure that you keep up with folks. Because I have an anxiety of having too much in my inbox, like the zero inbox. I wouldn’t say that I adhere to that.
But I will say that the onus of storage and organization is on me with a newsletter in ways that it isn’t, or a listserv, anything that goes to my inbox, in ways that it isn’t with a blog. Then I can kind of find it, and it’s external. I actually have had the experience of unsubscribing from newsletters. And then actually with our, since James brought up our Slack channel, we actually created an RSS feed, which
translates a lot of newsletters that I found particularly anxiety inducing where they’re coming out multiple times during a week. I unsubscribed from that and then added it to our RSS feed. That way I’m able to keep up in a way that I feel like I have a little bit more control. Do you encounter that at all? I feel like maybe it’s a double -edged sword in terms of like, yes, you have the control, but there are people like me who are like, please don’t clutter my inbox.
Dan Moore
Totally. Yeah, yeah, And that’s a really good point. Like, that’s not something I would do after I just shook somebody’s hand, right? Like, hello, hey, I’m Dan, you know, please subscribe my newsletter, right? It’s something if you realize that they are interested in the topic that you’re that you’re talking about and in depth and do feel like they want to have a longer term relationship with you or, just keep in touch, right? I will say most modern newsletter platforms, you get a blog for free as well. And so it can kind of be a twofer, right? You can say, hey,
check out my newsletter or my blog and it’s here. And if you wanna get a via email, that’s great. If you wanna get a via RSS, that’s fine. If you wanna just bookmark it and check it periodically, that’s fine too. So I think the value in the newsletter is they have that option. The other value is that, and I think this is the constraining factor on newsletters and it is constraining in fact, pretty much all content to use James’s,
unpreferred term is that you have to earn that, right? And so you really have to deliver like good content wise words every time. And that force is almost an enforcement mechanism, right? And with newsletters, sometimes when you write on platforms or in blogs, like it’s a little bit like shouting into the void. With newsletters, you actually get feedback. Like I have
friends and colleagues who’ve written newsletters and they see unsubscribes when they move to a certain place. And that is, I would not say an unsubscribe is unadulterated negative feedback. It actually could mean that your audience is shifting because you’re shifting your viewpoint and you’re shifting your topics. That’s fine, but it is definitely a hundred percent feedback. And that’s, it’s way more visceral feedback than you’re gonna get from a lot of other platforms or a lot of other options. Does it answer your question?
Kate Holterhoff
It does. It does. it’s more, I think it’s the personal preference thing that we’re pointing at here. But yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.Dan, in your post, you know, I’m going to read a little bit back to you because I have some questions. So you say, quote, “don’t rewrite the text. The whole point of this process is to leverage existing content you have created in a low effort, sustainable way.” End quote. So my question to you is, Dan, why are you so lazy?
Dan Moore
I’m lazy because I’m busy. No, I think that in this particular context, it’s really about repurposing existing content. I have met with plenty of people, talked to plenty of people who let the perfect be enemy of the good. And I think that it’s way better to get started and get your thoughts out there out of Slack, out of Discord, out of that podcast and share them with the world than it is to have them be perfect. And then plus you get to be lazy. right?
Kate Holterhoff
Right. I’m on team lazy, especially when it comes to like not having to restate the same thing over and over again. I mean, that, think that goes with our philosophy here at RedMonk, which aligns with developers, you know, anytime you have to do something, more than two times, you might as well, find a way to automate it, correct? So Dan, you’ve just automated it. You’ve found a system, you’ve got a plan in place to make sure that you’re not replicating labor that is already done, right? Totally.
So at RedMonk, we also have a newsletter. And I actually wrote the September introductory letter part, helped coordinate delivering it and making sure that the links looked right, all of that.
And we’re sharing that amongst the analysts. James did the inaugural newsletter and set a very high bar. And it’s something that we’re excited about and we’re enthusiastic. So we’re all in. And so I am deeply interested in your perspective here, because I think we’re still trying to feel it out a little bit. mean, we’ve had a version of a newsletter for a while. But this is one where we’re actually trying to follow some best practices here and see what the community is looking for. Because I agree.
Newsletters are really having a moment. so Dan and I are both podcast buffs and on Hardfork, I know that there was one of our shared favorites. They actually spoke about moving away from Substack. And so I just know, I know there’s a lot of internal conversations around the delivery methods.
And then there’s also, you know, so there’s the consumption side, there’s a distribution side, but there’s also, I think, it evidences that we’re in the zeitgeist of newsletters. And I like this utopian idea again of the control method. You know, a lot of these social platforms are crashing and burning right now. And then there’s also sort of it’s up in the air about which one is going to dominate in our post Twitter era. So.
I guess maybe that explains it, but I think that there’s maybe more to it. And the genre is just a little different. I think that there’s some movement there, there’s some playfulness, but there’s a political angle as well.
Dan Moore
I think that the main reason why newsletters are having a moment is I mean, people are always looking for a place to have their thoughts heard, right? And it shifted from Usenet to blogs, to social media.
And then I think that, newsletters are coming back and it’s like a pendulum swinging where you have less reach. Although I think tools like Substack and a lot of the other kind of copycats or other platforms offer some sharing, some discoverability. It’s almost like a webring back in the blog days. But you’re trading that off for more. I mean, I would almost say intimacy, right?
Like when you actually arrive, when someone trusts you enough to receive your emails, even if they don’t read every single one, that is a real act of trust. And again, it’s easy to subscribe and unsubscribe. So it’s not like you’re taking a job with them or anything like that, but it’s definitely a higher level of relationship. And I think that that is very appealing to people. The other thing I would say is that the newsletters I’ve seen, you know, I’m, I’m a subscriber to the RedMonk newsletter.
I’m excited about it, but like, it’s interesting to like the level of fidelity, right? Like sometimes you have newsletters, get some that are, especially if they’re aimed at developers are very lo -fi, right? They’re kind of white background. They might be a list of links with small amounts of commentary. And then you get the corporate ones, which are way more manicured that are almost like, I sometimes I get them, I get one from my college that almost feels like it’s a little magazine, right? Like it’s way overproduced.
And I would say, if anyone’s thinking about starting a newsletter is start with a lo-fi version. Well, first of all, think about your audience. If I was marketing to a bunch of, artists, think starting with a lo-fi one would be a horrible idea. If you’re marketing to developers, think starting with a lo-fi one that’s like content rich is probably a good idea. So I guess start with your audience. But the fact is that it’s, even though email is a hard thing to design for, it’s still kind of a rich medium and you can kind of play around on the spectrum. And that’s totally ignoring the content, right? I’m just talking about like the form right now.
James Governor
Yeah. For me. I think there’s something here, and this is interesting, because we have to work this out as a firm. The question is about voice. And obviously with podcast, it’s an audio medium. as such, yes, of course, that’s voice. But I think with newsletters, yeah, you do have an expectation. Or the ones that I find appealing is that they do have a voice. And for RedMonk, we made a decision that we would take turns to curate the thing. But that’s also good, because RedMonk has always been, we’ve never felt as a firm that we wanted to have only one voice.
We’ve had an acknowledgement that as analysts, we always felt that actually it’s the conversation that is more interesting. but yeah, voice and authenticity, I think, are one of the reasons why newsletters are having their sort of moment in the sun, alongside the other issues you said, the portability and so on. do think that that, we want to especially, you know, obviously, and I think Paul Kedrosky this week created a new Four Ideas newsletter, which is basically AI generated, I’m sure that’ll do well. And that, mean, that’s a whole other voice. That’s a sort of a framing and let the AI do the work. But I think certainly in an era of AI and, these, these chat interfaces and so on, I think that’s an area where you, you do want to actually hear from people and
I’ve had this recent research that consumers don’t want to buy things that are labeled AI. And I think a newsletter is one of the things that, we want it to be generated by a human and we want some of their foibles and ways of communicating. want, my colleague Rachel Stevens’s, you know, humor or you want, know, Kelly Fitzpatrick, she brings just this authority that I guess she gained through academia.
that sort of the way she communicates and then know Kate I’ll let Kate say what her voice is but yeah well grumpy Steve O ‘Grady is one so we’ve all got you know mouthy monkchips is me so yeah what so Kate you’re midwest in Atlanta voice.
Kate Holterhoff
yeah today at least for sure
James Governor
Yeah, I think that’s for me anyway, why I like newsletters. I like them because I feel that there’s someone’s voice there. And that is something that I find appealing.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah. And since we’re looking for some strategies here, Dan, would you mind just giving us the rundown of what your best practices are for creating newsletters, especially as you outline them in the blog post?
Dan Moore
Sure. Sure. So I would say what I did want to call back a little bit to what James said about podcasts and the voice that comes from podcasting. I would say don’t sleep on podcasts as a source of newsletter content.
because I’ve definitely taken a podcast that goes on YouTube and I transcribe it using one of the bajillion free tools out there. And then I will actually paste it into like a chat GPT and say, Hey, break this up into like sections for me, you know, topic areas. And then from there, I never use what the chat GPT actually does to turn that in newsletter. Because I think that is, what’s that term AI slop. If you just take it directly, what it like summarize.
but you can use it to find pointers into the podcast. And then you can use the actual text that the person said and edit it because we all put ums and blahs and likes into it, but don’t sleep on podcasts or live streams as sources of content, which plays into your question, which is where do you get the content from? And it does depend on what kind of newsletter you’re trying to build. If it’s a link newsletter, then we have
spreadsheets and things like that to like just capture interesting links. I like to basically send an email to myself, but there are other ways to do this. Anytime I run across anything interesting or sometimes I’ll use Hacker News as my link collection, right? If there’s anything that I think is mildly interesting, then I post there. If you are really looking to pull things out of Slack, then I think that it’s really important that
or LinkedIn or other platforms, I will drop everything into a Google Doc, you know, just once every month or so I’ll go through and like target things and pull the content into a Google Doc. And then from there I do kind of further fashioning and try to bring posts together conceivably, because sometimes a post can be a hundred words or something like that. And you can expand it. You can…
combine it with another post and then turn that into the newsletter content. and one of the things that I find interesting is this is actually something you could conceivably outsource. you talked about your voice, James. and I think that I actually have a client that I do this for because he’s very busy, but he wants a newsletter, but he wants it in his voice and I can’t write it in his voice. And so I’ll take his stuff and I’ll mildly edit it and turn that into a newsletter. but it’s almost all his voice and it’s his terms because he wrote it. I just expanded it, corrected it, things like that. I think that
James Governor
I don’t know how I feel about that.
Dan Moore
But by leveraging what you’re already doing, it’s basically just kind of, I mean, it is just a point of leverage, right?
James Governor
We do that sometimes. What we’ll do is when we’re sometimes working on blog posts, I’ll be talking about Kate, provide a little bit of context, and then it’ll go into the first draft, and then she always cuts it out when she publishes. So that happens. So my voice, which sometimes tries to inveigle its way into Dr. Kate Holterhoff’s excellent writing, that word gets excised.
Kate Holterhoff
James has a chip on his shoulder, if that’s not abundantly clear. You know, James, that part of being a consultant is being able to say a small thing in a very long way. And sometimes it just doesn’t translate to writing.
James Governor
You can edit out my thing about voice, because I fucking talked about voice for like 20 minutes and that was completely unnecessary. I needed to say was voice and all. Yeah, no, that’s going to go now, isn’t it? It’s all going to go. Kate’s going to be like, yeah, whatever. Yeah. but no.
Kate Holterhoff
Not a chance.
James Governor
you know, that is a, that is a, again, I think from a firm perspective, it’s interesting because, you know, when we made that decision years ago that we weren’t going to spend vast amounts of time back and forthing and rewriting each other’s work in order to have some sort of consistent voice of the company. And then over time, we just realized that just made no sense and that better to celebrate the voices
in the company. And that’s why we very much have blogs. People choose what the name of their blog will be. We expect them. We encourage them to build and establish a research and authorial voice. me that was kind of what I saw with newsletters, like whether or not which one came first, the chicken or the egg or whatever it is, you know, the towering edifice pretty clearly.
that there are, you know, people used to have link roles, you know, like you go to the blog or, you know, and certainly link posts were very popular back in the day. And I do think some of the things that blogs, it does sort of feel like, look, it just turns out that email is, is, is a longer running protocol than RSS in terms of it’s usage. And so I think some of, some of that writing for blogs, some of those dynamics, feel like newsletters have brought them back.
Dan Moore
Can I ask real quick about like the voices, like the, like the voices, the analyst thing. Cause I think that’s really interesting. when you talk to talk about like DevRel, which is something that I used to do and I’m still kind of involved in you all. know we’re very involved with DevRel community. feels like when someone’s in DevRel, they are the external facing at least to developers like face of the company. And so you’ve constantly chosen to have each of your analysts be externally facing, right? Cause you could definitely have analysts that weren’t externally facing or were only externally facing to like clients, right? But you’ve chosen to have all your analysts be public figures, I think probably makes it easier and harder to recruit analysts, right? Or easier and harder to like determine whether it’s a, like it’s the kind of company that people want to work with, right? Cause you’re not working with RedMonk the way that you work with like a Gartner or a Forrester. Am I allowed to say those names on your podcast? Sorry.
James Governor
Quick, those out, Kate. Okay. Use that heavy, heavy pen. Get rid of it. we,
Dan Moore
You’re working, you’re working with a Kate, right? Or you’re working with a James, right? Those are, and, and not that you won’t sub for each other or things like that, but like, it really feels like it’s much more of like a, personal working relationship. Do you find that that’s a benefit or a cost or kind of like it cuts both ways?
James Governor
I think there’s always sort of trade offs in any decision you make.
Dan Moore
That’s a consultant’s answer right there. Nice work.
James Governor
Yeah, was beautiful. 100 % right. So it served us pretty well. One of the questions is, and I think that some companies are like, wait, we don’t want to externalize the voice because if we do, then everyone’s going to come and like poach that person or whatever else. I mean, we’ve lost people over the years.
because it’s the voice that attracts, right? But that said, look, they’re always going to be positives and negatives. In terms of our working relationship with clients, we do feel that hearing those voices and that voice of the authorial voice and that the authority voice on a subject, we hope that that does help clients to understand
what are the subjects that we as analysts are best equipped to answer those questions? And sure, you can go to RedMonk and like, you look, as you just use the dread word consultant, I mean, I don’t mind you mentioning my competitors, but how dare you call me a consultant? Anyway, no, it’s true. It’s fair enough. So the thing there is, and you know, people have, you know, found a consulting syndrome. It’s a derangement of some
Obviously, none of my clients are deranged, but if they were, they might be deranged in such a way that they would always want to talk to me or Steve. let’s talk to the founder. You know, like we can talk to the founder. So let’s talk to the founder. One of the things about those other voices is people really begin to wreck. wait, hang on. I don’t want to talk to James and Steve. They don’t know anything about that. Or I don’t I don’t want to talk to them, you know, on a subject in that way. So, yeah, I think that
It’s definitely beneficial, especially for us because we tend to encourage people to be able to consult on and understand a range of topics. Like we’re not going to be the absolute deepest. mean, if you want us to come and sort of analyze the absolute deepest level gorp about
two or three different say Kubernetes distributions, we’re probably not the right people to do that. On the other hand, we will have spoke to a lot of folks that are using all of those distributions and have been able to, you know, have a reasoned view on what some of the strengths and weaknesses are. But I think where I was going that is just that we’re about context. So, you know, we would expect people to, you know, we had a choice. Do we have an AI analyst and no one else talks about AI? That seemed like it was a really bad idea.
because AI is going to touch every area of the stack. Do we have specializations? 100%. But because we make people sort of bring context to bear, people then are attracted to that, the context and the way that’s put together. And yeah, that’s one of the reasons I think voice has significantly benefited RedMonk. And look, we’ve got a reputation for authenticity that nobody else in the industry has in the analyst business. I mean, we are seen as having a sort of For whatever reason, yeah, we all see it as authentic. I think, again, that’s a function of voice.
Dan Moore
I wouldn’t say it’s for whatever reason. I say it’s because you have been authentic. It’s because, and frankly, I think to some extent because it’s smaller and because you’ve elevated the voices and because it’s hard for a company to be authentic. think it’s really, really difficult for a company to be authentic. think it’s really, it’s easier for people to be authentic. Right. And so if you’re a group of people that, you know, if I’m engaging with Kelly for my analysis, it’s different than me engaging with company XYZ for my analysis. It’s just a different feel. so I wouldn’t say for whatever reason, James, I’d say you’re authentic. mean, it’s almost self-fulfilling. It’s tautological, right? Like, I don’t know how you can be authentic other than being authentic. I’m sure things you can point to, but it’s really hard to, yeah. So this strayed a little bit far, from newsletters, but interesting.
Kate Holterhoff
So did you have any final questions for Dan, James?
James Governor
yeah. Well, yeah, what we didn’t really talk about is that so Dan, like we didn’t ask, how many newsletters do you subscribe to? And then what tools do you use? Like, historically, we all had RSS and, you know, we had our chosen, reader, and then
that, you know, big, big boo to Google, talking with readers. Google, they own social media in the RSS era and they blew that so comprehensively. It is so dumb. But anyway, that’s another, maybe that’s another podcast. But what tools, Dan, like how do you, because there’s various tools that will manage, or do you just have a folder or? Yeah. How do you, you know, I bet you, I bet you read loads of them. Don’t you?
Dan Moore
I do. I think that it’s important to acknowledge kind of what you’re using the newsletters for. And we could probably, again, this is probably a separate podcast in another six or nine months, like, because it’s different, there are different newsletters I subscribe to for different reasons, but I’ve probably subscribed to about 30 ish.
And I will say that like the two things I use to deal with, to make the tools I use to deal with them are one, my inbox and two, like permission not to read every single thing. And so there are tons of newsletters that I subscribe to that I read one out of every 10 issues and I’m okay with that. And it’s just something that I accept.
I don’t think there are any specialized technology tools. I think it’s more like control of your attention and not being a perfectionist about reading everything.
James Governor
You’re too busy on Hacker News to read newsletters. Well, it does actually dovetail nicely because lots of times stuff from Hacker News goes to newsletters or vice versa. So oftentimes if I’m looking for interesting stuff to share, I’ll pop open a newsletter and just look at a couple of things. there’s a…some kind of cycle. not sure what the virtuous or a deadly cycle there,
Kate Holterhoff
It’s a cycle one way the other. All right. Well, on the note of cycles then, why don’t we wrap up and have you back on to extemporize on one of these other subjects that we’ve drug in here. So, but before we do, Dan, are there any good social channels where folks can follow your deep thoughts on the matter or other ways that we can follow your insights?
Dan Moore
LinkedIn is probably the best thing as a former colleague of mine said, it’s the, seems like the only social network run by grownups at this point. So that’s where I spend a lot of time posting.
Kate Holterhoff
I haven’t heard that. like that. that’s good. And we’ll include, a link to your blog post in the show notes as well as your LinkedIn and your newsletter, I guess, is that related? That’s tied to your blog, I’m guessing the way to sign up for your newsletter.
Dan Moore
Yeah, I can. I’ll make sure you guys get you all linked to my newsletter. It is focused on customer identity and access management. And I didn’t even talk about this as one of the benefits of a newsletter is it does force you the same way as a blog to like really dig into a topic. And so if you want to be if you want to learn about topic X starting news on it can be a great way to be a forcing function to do that. anyway, that’s what my current newsletter is mostly about.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, that sounds interesting. All right, so we will include all those in the notes. Been so much fun having you back on for round two, Dan. So much to say about these subjects. So I’m glad we can make this conversation ongoing here. Again, your co-hosts from the RedMonk side, have been Kate Holterhoff and James Governor. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you are watching us on YouTube, please like, subscribe and engage with us in the comments.
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