Where Everybody's Crazy

So here we go again, a new newsletter. But this time I'm trying out a much nicer and shinier PDF version.

This gives me pause. I've so far been sending out a mail which is a mixture of plain text and HTML, so people can read it in their browsers in whatever format they prefer. I have been hesitant about PDF because it takes people another click through to open the newsletter. Let's be blunt, people don't always read all the mails they get, and I don't labour under the understanding that my newsletter is so vitally important that people will fall over themselves to read it. Keeping the attention span is important, and so I've gone for nice simple version that loads in the mail client and doesn't look too awful.

But the PDF version does look a whole lot nicer, even though it doesn't fit neatly into my automated distribution thingy. So I could:

• Keep the HTML/plain text combination for mail, and use the PDF for printed newsletters.
• Send up another mailing list for people who are committed to opening and reading the PDF.
• Send a huge HTML/text/PDF monster mail.
• Drop the HTML/text and just send PDF, trusting people to click through and read it, even though it's a bit bigger.
• Give up on the PDF experiment.

Anyone out there got any opinions?

I've noticed something in Japan that I suspected a while ago would happen: nobody gives out URLs any more. More and more adverts, particularly on trains, look like this:

There is a URL in this instance, but it's designed for mobile phone use. The message to everyone else is, "Just Google for the company name, we're the first hit". Which is basically how everyone uses the web anyway these days.

Hey, what do you think of this? I'll be munging this blog to fit the design soon, and maybe trying to fit Memories into it as well.

Hmm, it's not bilingual; it should probably be bilingual...