Laura Scott posted her 9 best practices and things to avoid when it comes to e-mail. We followed some of these rules a decade ago, but a good reminder is always appreciated. Laura doesn't mention anything about not using all CAPS in an e-mail and I assume that's because if you don't know that rule by now...nine rules is beyond your grasp.

My favorite rule to follow is number 3:

Write your response above the quoted text.

I don't think I'm alone when I say I don't like having to scroll down just to read what you have written. I already know what I wrote -- and if I don't remember, I can scroll down to look. When you deal with over 100 real emails a day, this becomes all the more important.

Don't make me scroll! Please!

I've always been unsure where to place the quoted text in an e-mail. If I recall correctly, doesn't (didn't) Thunderbird place the quote above text by default? I'm sure it's Mozilla's fault as to why I'm so confused...

"The sense of loss I feel about the decline of e-mail has less to do with how we communicate than with what
we communicate. The means by which we deliver a message affects its
content. While the rise of the BlackBerry has proven that e-mail can be
adapted for fast-burst communiqués, the medium is best-suited for
longer musings. As opposed to instant messaging, e-mail provides the
breathing room to contemplate what we're writing and express nuanced
thoughts."

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Collaboration.  Everyone wants to do it better.  Collaboration.  Everyone wants to find that perfect online tool which can support needed communication necessary for good collaboration .  Collaboration.  Every company in the business wants to provide you their tool to help you make collaboration work for you.

Perhaps ReviewBasics might be just the communication tool you're looking for to meet your collaboration requirements.  Tim Shih, SharpStyle Labs, has been wanting me to take a look at their collaboration feedback tool, ReviewBasics.   Mr. Shih writes:

ReviewBasics is a collaboration feedback gathering platform which allows professionals across many industries to exchange ideas, gather thoughts, and review various types of creative, interactive, motion, and written content. We take a familiar, paper-based content review process and bring it online. Please visit our website at www.reviewbasics.com and you can demo our features.

Check out the “Demo” link on our homepage. This link lets you directly try out our images, website, documents, and video review technology. With ReviewBasics, designers, photographers, bloggers, and business professionals can utilize our technology and gather feedback from peers to improve work products.

So I finally took some time to take a look at SharpStyle Lab's new product which is currently in beta.  ReviewBasics allows for feedback on four types of "content pages": websites, images, documents and  videos.  The solutions the application are intended to provide are for creative and design, opinion research, film and video, and legal.

With all do respect to Bill Maher, here are some “new rules” that I’d like to see for the collaboration and communication market.

E-mail ought to be smarter. We receive a lot of press announcements about new and exciting products. Often our first response is to forward these announcements out to the rest of our team. This leads to a flood of “I’ve already received this” messages back the sender. E-mail systems ought to be able to tell users that the message they are about to forward has already been received by their peers.

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This is another typical tech doomsday articles, but well worth the read.   The article, Is the Internet Ready to Break?, was published in Baseline:

Reports of the Internet's death are greatly exaggerated. But the growth of video and broadband access will require new investment, technology and thinking to keep it healthy.

The fact is that if no one considered IT worst case scenarios we most likely wouldn't be able to prevent them or at least be prepared for the events.  We have a couple words for that.  It's called contingency planning.

"Accurate and complete requirements are essential to the success of any software project. Getting this part of the architecture correct requires both people and technical skills to capture and refine the right requirements. Discover the useful skills and tools for modeling requirements, and learn how to evaluate progress in competency."

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