An excellent conversation tonight, kicked off by Martin assertion that email should do away with physical mail. Jackson and Corey and I talked about thank you notes and the ‘lost art’ of letter writing (my experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer on a South Pacific island taught me that the more mail you send out, the more mail you get in), while Roy nodded in the corner, worn out from his extra hours rewriting Tabulas. Jackson says he doesn’t read long blogs posts or articles, but does tag them in his del.iciou.us bookmarks (Corey subscribes to the feed). Letter writing and junk mail led into a discussion of newspapers and magazines. At home, my wife and I are reorganizing our home office, and I have to decide whether to save a stack of old newspapers from the Sixties (moon landing, Nixon Resigns, etc.) WillR and Kerry joined us, and added their thoughts on ebooks and the feel of a magazine. WillR recently trashed years of computer magazines and a box of punch cards. Naturally, we moved onto DRMs, the evil RIAA and whether copyright and intellectual property protections can survive in a digital world. Jackson spoke passionately about the shift from owning a physical record or compact disk to renting a digital song or album, and he wonders what the reaction will be when people learn that they can’t take a song with them once they stop subscribing to a music service. We did talk about blogs, of course, and how the issues above play into our online writing. We ended with a brief chat about the BlogTogether Teach-in this Saturday from 12-2 at the UNC Health Sciences Library. Be sure to join us that day for help with your blog. Don’t have a blog? We’ll help you create one on the spot.