If EMail is EFail, What's EFTW?

Image by Nils Geylen via Flickr"The underlying problem is that individual human beings don't scale." - Jeff Atwood

Not only is email inefficient, it leads to lost information. If I send you something by email, but Bob needs that info, how is he supposed to get it? In this day in age, if you can't get it through a Google search bar, it doesn't exist.

Now, I don't want to dump all of my company's information into the big G's index, and their appliances are a little pricey. So what do we do about internal data? Here are a couple of ideas I've come up with recently.

• Set up Wordpress and post time sensitive notices there.


• Set up a Mediawiki and use it to document EVERYTHING.


• When someone asks you a question, reply with the link, not the info.


• When you get information by email, put it in the wiki and reply with the new link


• When the volume of information starts to grow, set up Nutch, the open source search engine, or invest in a Google Mini.

This doesn't solve every problem. For instance, you still don't get a private Twitter or FriendFeed, but with a little creativity, I'm sure you can hack something together.

Final thought: Email is an expensive way to transfer information, and your time is to valuable.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google updates search box