This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz
by Eric Gunnerson.
Original Post: Blog Alerts
Feed Title: Eric Gunnerson's C# Compendium
Feed URL: /msdnerror.htm?aspxerrorpath=/ericgu/Rss.aspx
Feed Description: Eric comments on C#, programming and dotnet in general, and the aerodynamic characteristics of the red-nosed flying squirrel of the Lesser Antilles
I recently signed my blog up for the LiveMessage alert system. This means that, if you want, rather than having to goto my blog web page to see if there are new posts, you can get a notification directly.
If you're already using an RSS aggregator (SharpReader, RSS Bandit, NewGator, etc.), that this likely isn't of much interest to you.
All you need to do is click on the block below, and sign up. The downsides are that it's Passport based, and you have to agree to expose your email through your passport. Not a big deal for me, since I already have my email address published far and wide, but may be an issue for lots of others, since you can't say "expose my email address only to this site", nor can you use different addresses.
You can use IM or mobile notification rather than email and avoid this, but I'm pretty sure that the number of people who want to get an IM message when I write a new blog entry is considerably less than one, so I don't think this will be of much use.
What do you think of such a system? It doesn't really solve my "keep in touch with my family" goal, because I'd have to get them all signed up with passports and enrolled in the system.