A lighthearted romp into the past to examine communications milestones
When I began writing Al Harberg's Software Marketing Newsletter six thousand years ago, it was only logical that I chose to publish it from Erech, a bustling city in southwestern Asia. At that time, Erech was the only civilization that had a written language, and the only city with the electronic infrastructure to support massive distribution of newsletters. Sure, I could have used the limestone tablets that were popular back then, but postal-mailing limestone can be expensive. We had a vocabulary of nearly 1,000 words. People who could write, flourished. Newsletter writers received the same public adulation as sculptors and other rock stars.
The Egyptians introduced hieroglyphics around 3700BC, and email suffered. Youngsters point to the problems circa 1975AD, trying to get ASCII-based personal computers to communicate with EBCDIC-based mainframes. These glitches pale by comparison with the cuneiform-to-hieroglyphics data exchanges that we wrestled with every day. Responding to the need for speed, the Egyptians introduced cursive hieroglyphics. We had more variations in word images than Windows 3.1 users had fonts.
Five hundred years later, I migrated my newsletter to Sumerian cuneiform. These wedge-shaped indentations in clay tablets were all the rage around 3500BC. Who would have thought that they'd stay in vogue for nearly 3,000 years? Early adopters thrived. People who could make clay wedgies wielded a lot of power. Meanwhile, computer manufacturers discovered that they could combine copper and tin to make bronze. But computers were pretty much still made from rocks and clay. The popularity of computing was on the rise, and my newsletter subscription numbers were growing, too.
The Chinese got into the writing game around 3000BC. They toyed with creating symbols to represent words, and within 500 years had a widely accepted set of symbols. By 2700BC, herbal medicine and acupuncture newsletters could be found throughout the region's electronic bandwidth.
My newsletter got a lot easier to write and distribute when people got around to creating alphabets. By 2500BC, the Sumerians had created a cuneiform script alphabet with 600-or-so simplified signs. By 1700BC, papyrus had pretty much replaced clay, limestone, and rocks as the printed newsletter medium of choice. With fewer rocks being turned into newsletters, more computers could be built. Later, Europeans built their computing machines from iron, and most Middle Eastern manufacturers used bronze. Innovators in England were using Stonehenge to investigate marketplaces beyond the traditional opportunities on this planet. It was a golden age for newsletters.
The alphabet fad ran rampant. In 1700BC, we had a 30-consonant, vowel-free alphabet. Five hundred years later, the Phoenicians were using a 22-letter alphabet. The Greek alphabet became popular around 800BC. The Roman alphabet, which was the foundation for English, was introduced about 700BC. Anglo-Saxon, the earliest form of English, developed as a dialect in England. Modern English arose around 1066AD.
Gutenberg helped newsletter editors immensely. No, not Steve Guttenberg, the actor in Ron Howard's 1985AD movie Cocoon. Johann Gutenberg, the Mainz-based printer, was at the forefront of using movable metal type in the mid-1400s. The Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Series II helped a lot, too.
At some time between the creation of these early languages, and the present state of civilization, humankind developed nearly 3,000 languages (2,796 according to Charles Berlitz, grandson of the founder of the Berlitz language schools, and author of Native Tongue). That number triples if you include significant dialects.
According to Berlitz, today there are 101 languages with one million or more speakers each. The most popular (in order of number of speakers) are Chinese, English, Hindustani, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, Indonesian, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Bengali, Malay, and Italian.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), completed in 1928AD after 71 years of incredible effort, tells us the meaning of everything. At least, The Meaning of Everything is the title of Simon Winchester's best-selling story of the OED. Interestingly, one of the OED's editors, Henry Bradley, had the ability to read books upside down (the books were upside down; presumably, Mr. Bradley was in no danger of having too much blood rush into his head). There are no reports of his having read newsletters upside down. The second edition of the OED, a 20-volume, 21,730-page, 140-pound library published in 1989AD, defines 615,100 words, up from the 200,000-or-so English words that were in use at the end of the Renaissance.
During the past few centuries, books and magazines have tended to be well-written. That's because it was expensive to create and distribute a printed, bound volume, and only well-written works got ink. Today, electronic newsletters can be created at near-zero expense, and the vetting process simply doesn't exist in many quarters. This causes problems.
In the past, people learned to write well, not by writing a lot, but by reading a lot. Today, much of what we read was hastily and poorly composed on the Internet. We're training the current generation of readers to ignore spelling, grammar, syntax, agreement, sense, and the other basic building blocks that make reading enjoyable and effective.
A few serious comments about your newsletter
Newsletter publishers need to do it right, not because of some high-minded intellectual goal, but because well-written newsletters are persuasive. And because persuasive writing can sell software. The bottom line: Do it right. Read well-written books and newsletters about business, sales and marketing. Lots. Create a newsletter to promote your business and sell more software. Lots. Throughout time, newsletters have enabled entrepreneurs to get their message out to the buying public. Newsletters rock!
Quick Links:
Lists: computer, business
, education, multimedia, game, programming, others
Ordering: place an order, prices and time frames, sample news releases, about us
Information: free newsletters, press release FAQ
Copyright © 1997-2010 DP Directory, Inc.
|
. |
. |
 |
 |
 |
|
Press releases put your software in front of thousands of eyeballs.
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
Those 300-word write-ups about your competitors' software in the computer magazines - they're your competitors' press releases.
Are you getting your share of free publicity?
|
|
|
|
|
Take the mystery out of brand extensions with Al's free newsletter.
|
|
|
|
|
|
