Inter­est­ing post from Ben Brooks about how Twit­ter and Face­book are attempt­ing to replace email even as both ser­vices rely might­ily upon email to work.

"Trying to whittle down an inbox of 130 to 0 is intimidating. You can knock off 20 and it doesn’t feel like you made any progress. It would be useful if an email app had a “help you to get to inbox zero” mode where it would only show you 20 emails at a time. Once you knocked those out, 20 more fill in. This way you can see the progress you are making on a small scale (from 20 to 18 to 13 to 7 to 0) and stay motivated to keep knocking them out on a large scale."

One school benefits by ditching mass emails and keeping all communication on a staff blog. The information is archived, searchable, and comments beat the heck out of traditional email.

Danah Boyd explains why she takes time offline every year.

Some tips on how to manage email and make it a happy place again.

Training an email filter to better tame an inbox.

An interesting, and apparently controversial, idea to conduct email audits as a method for making business more efficient.

Merlin Mann gives a great talk about time and attention in the business world. The talk was largely a riff since the slides didn't work.

Interesting observations about how some startups are turning the inbox into more of a platform for apps.