My problem here was that a client asked needed to extract data from a few disparate sources and build a clean, usable list of email addresses. Certainly, no small feat since some of this would have to come out of an email account itself. I wasn’t even going to benefit from working from contacts either – addresses had to come from the messages themselves. I’m going to describe what I did to get there.
Last year I had an idea: Create a really, really high quality newsletter. Reading technology related news is a daily and rigorous ritual for me, so why not take that effort and synthesize it into a curated list of “What to Read”? Many others are doing this, of course, but I felt the value for readers was to get it from your trusted technical advisor (I manage technology for a number of small and medium sized businesses). For many years this voracious appetite for news and information was only for myself, but I knew it was time to change that. Time to share this with the world.
Blogs, sites, social networks, and news sites are all vying or your time. With all that noise, it can be difficult to ingest the most compelling and useful information out there. In the past, I’ve resisted the idea of being part of that noise because I didn’t want to contribute to it. Over time, I realized that a great portion of my time is spent weeding through the noise. I do it so you don’t have to.