Interment.net is an online publisher of cemetery records and materials relating to cemeteries. The largest group of users of this web site is genealogists who are looking for records to help trace their family history, and learn something about cemeteries in general.
The owners of Interment.net have been sending frequent e-mail newsletters listing new records added to the database and other news items. However, the owners have now announced that they will no longer send e-mail newsletters and instead are switching to an RSS news feed.
The following are extracts from the Interment.net web site:
Interment.net has ceased accepting new subscribers to its mailing list (Interment-L). We will no longer send out mailings.
Sending out e-mail notifications of new cemetery transcriptions has become increasingly difficult. Every time we sent out a mailing, about half of all e-mails are bounced back as undeliverable, either because the e-mail addresses are not valid anymore, or because the recipient's inbox is full, or because of strict spam-filtering techniques.
As a result, most mailings don't reach their destination, and thus the mailing list has become largely ineffective.
The mailing list has become very expensive.
RSS technology has become very popular in the past several months, and it looks like its going to become even more popular.
We are instead utilizing an RSS newsfeed.
You can read the entire announcement at http://www.interment.net/newsfeed.htm
This sounds like déjà vu. If you have been reading my newsletter for the past year or more, you know that I have also struggled with decreasing delivery rates of e-mail newsletters and increased costs. I have also inaugurated an RSS news feed although I still send the e-mail version of the newsletter for those that are able to receive it. Nonetheless, I do believe that RSS news feeds are the wave of the future for electronic newsletters. Interment.net is only the latest addition to the list of genealogy publications available via RSS, I suspect there will be many more.
You can subscribe to Interment.net's news feed at: http://www.interment.net/rss.xml . You will need an RSS newsreader (sometimes referred to as "news aggregator") in order to read the articles. The same news reader will also read Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and more than 100 other genealogy-related "blogs." There are many such programs available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and even a few that are web-based. Many of them are free of charge.
For more information about obtaining a free news reader, go to http://blogspace.com/rss/readers.
For more information about Interment.net, go to http://www.interment.net.
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