I did something the other night that I never thought I’d do again; I started redistributing a text email newsletter. Yes, just like it was in the glory days of 1996, I went back to producing a simple text digest of links every day. I’m always finding stuff that nobody else seems to surface – and I’m still doing my best to remain outside the echo chamber. Besides, I really missed the one-on-one interaction in the inbox.

You might remember my argument that email, indeed, is dead. The only thing that will give me a change of heart is a substantial growth in subscribers. We’re well over 100,000 known Gnomies today – and I’m going to figure out how to double that number (legitimately) in the next year. You can join the list by sending an email message to picks@lockergnome.com (and encourage your friends to do so as well). More importantly, I’m actively taking link suggestions – yours, perhaps?

Lockergnome has been undergoing a metamorphosis for quite some time now, which largely precipitated this change of heart. The Web site, itself, is ready to accept anybody as a contributor (going splitsies on AdSense) – though the classic channels will continue to exist and flourish. We’ve got a new design coming soon, but I believe we’re open to accept beta bloggers (as opposed to beta blockers). You may already have a blog, but I betcha we could drive more traffic to your content if you were on our network. It’s an invite-only system right now, so just drop me a line if you want in.

And the text-only “Pirillo’s Picks” Lockergnome newsletter? We’re going to start driving massive traffic again, mark my words. I drove over 30,000 clicks (distributed across 12 links) in the first issue – and counting.

Maybe it’s just HTML newsletters that are dead? Was plain text awesome all along? Care to go retro with me? I gotta find another 100,000 link clickers out there.

Producing Text Email Newsletters Again