Caveat Lector

Stop emailing me stuff to tout on CavLec. Please just stop.

Books, reports, survey results, whatever… if I run into it in the ordinary course of business (meaning, in my regularly-read blogs or via my hybrid FriendFeed/Twitter network) and think it’s interesting, I’ll blog it. Honestly, though, whether I blog something has less to do with whether I think it’s worthwhile or useful and more to do with whether it touches off something in my head. CavLec is not a link-blog; I use del.icio.us and FriendFeed for that. CavLec is where I think out loud.

Anything of that nature that you email me automatically goes in my “you annoyed me, and therefore I won’t talk about you on CavLec except pejoratively even if I might otherwise be interested” mental file. This is obviously not the file you want to be in.

So please, please, please take me off those mover-and-shaker email lists you’re compiling. Have somebody start you a blog, one interesting and human enough that I want to read it. (OCLC, Palinet, and Talis have done it; so can you.) Put somebody on FriendFeed who’s interesting and human enough for me to want to subscribe to. Those tactics might work, subject to my brain’s caprices. But do not email me. As I said a while ago when Pew Internet tried this:

I value my bloggy independence, as I have from the very beginnings of CavLec, and I’m ornery as a kicked mule. If you push me to read and talk about something you have a direct interest in, not because you think it’s useful to me, and not because you intend to put my input to some sort of practical use (as with, say, a standards draft), but because you want to create buzz? To hell with you. I won’t just not read or review it, I’ll be more than a little tempted to call you out in public… That goes double if you try to hide your interest from me…

I’m trying to help you here. I know y’all work very hard on what you produce, and you want to see it read and pondered. Tactics matter, is all I’m saying. This means you, “Jessica Disch” of PSBPR.com.