Old media and new media suck when they collide

I don’t really read magazines anymore.  I never really liked them much
growing up.  Books are more my thing.  I have subscribed to National
Geographic and Discovery and a couple others over the last several
years.  I normally realize that I haven’t read them in a year and
ignore the renewal notice.

I’m an internet man.  It looks like
somebody has decided to merge the blogging/podcasting excitement with
traditional magazine distribution.  I heard about Blogger &
Podcaster magazine.  It doesn’t officially launch until January, but
they are taking subscriptions now.

I must be pretty cutting edge
to have heard about this magazine and been invited to subscribe this
early, right?  I must be pretty cool.  Won’t Newsome be jealous when Mike and Scoble start mentioning me on their blogs now that I have managed to get into the inner circle.

How
did I get notified of this amazing new magazine?  Well…actually…I
was spammed.  Okay, nobody is going to care about me after all.  Maybe
they got my name through some semi-legitimate mailing list but I never
asked for information about the magazine in anywhere near a direct
way.  They either scraped my email address or bought it.

Who
creates a magazine about blogging and podcasting where every issue will
probably be outdated before the magazine actually gets printed.  And,
then who notifies potential subscribers about it by spamming them. 
Don’t most people who use the internet a lot (presumably their
subscriber base) have a generally unfavorable opinion toward spam and
enjoy mocking such things on their blogs?

Wouldn’t it be more
effective to notify the A-listers about their magazine or maybe drop
comments on people’s blogs instead of spamming my inbox?  Here’s the
part that gets me.

To be deleted from our mailing list, please reply and write “remove” in the subject line.

It
sounds like they are planning to continue spamming me unless I say
pretty please to get them to stop.  I don’t plan on begging.  I’ll just
mark them as spam and let gmail filter them out for me.

Weird
marketting gone bad if you ask me.  The plan to start getting some less
geeky people to get into the blogging/podcasting phenomenon should not
be to send out unsolicited email blasts.

Technorati Tags: magazine, blogging, podcast, spam