6 Steps to Effortless Inter-Generational Communication
As we all hurtle through our daily lives we often lose track of family members and older family friends. Most people accept that, Grandma and Grandpa aren’t on Facebook and neither are some of the older neighbors who used to show interest as family friends. So they get the five minute update at Christmas and Thanksgiving or maybe if you run into them at the grocery store, right? What about the fact that your grandparents are always interested in you and you will one day be a grandparent? Or maybe for those of us more motivated by profit, a number of your family friends have worked hard to earn a prominent place in the business world but they have no idea what you’re up to or whether you might have the skills to fill a great position in their organization. Regardless of whether you are looking to keep up with your close family or your older family friends who are less than wifi-enabled, here is a quick way to keep them in the loop.
First, let’s assume that, like most of the population, you have a digital camera or camera phone. Thats all you need! Many people have tried family blogs or family newsletters but, most people just look at the pictures anyways. So just give them the pictures, right in their email, one of the only internet technologies those over 40 use with any consistency. Here’s how:
6 Steps to Automatic Communication with the WWW-challanged
1. Set up an account with a photo service like Flickr, I suggest Flickr because it is far less ad-filled than the rest and extremely easy to use.
2. Scroll to the bottom of your Flickr photo page and and copy the RSS link for your latest photos. The link looks like this:
3. Go to FeedBlitz and start a new newsletter. I use FeedBlitz because I can add my relatives email addresses without them having to go through a complicated sign-up process (if they don’t like it they can unsubscribe!). As you go through the process it will ask you for a feed that you want the newsletter based on, paste in the RSS feed for your latest Flickr photos from the last post and make any other customizations (you can even include ads to see if you can make a few cents off of Grandma every time she gets your latest photos 
).
4. After setting up the main newsletter, click the “
Subscribers, import and export” link and enter all of your relatives, family friends or others you want your photo newsletter to go out to.
5. Select your delivery schedule from the main page and select how often you want it sent (hint, no one wants to be spammed 8 times a day with pictures of you wandering around, deliver it at a decent interval).
6. Go back to your Flickr and start uploading your pictures! Your friends and family will have them delivered right to their inbox, no navigation or effort on your part required!
Ways to feed Flickr
1. Standard upload (from your digital camera) (be sure to designate the photos you don’t want Grandma checkin’ out as “private”)
2. Email (I email my photos in as I take them from my iPhone)
3. Mobile messaging
Final Note
I was going to suggest the use of the RSS manipulation site xFruits that I had been using for a long time but, it’s RSS to email function has not been working for a long time now so this solution, although slightly more complex, is the best I could find. Any suggestions are appreciated.
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December 30th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Hey great post. This must have slipped past me earlier (squished between tons of other great newlycorp. posts), but what a great idea! I’m going to check out this Feedsmith service tonight…
This would be really great if Flickr offered an RSS feed based on a certain tag (other services like del.icio.us do this). Flickr may do this, but I don’t think so - I’ll look into it.
December 30th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Update — yes, that is possible with Flickr. So you can give grandma and grandpa a newsletter with of all your pics tagged “Family Friendly”, instead of all of your pics tagged “Booze Time”.
December 30th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Haha, nice. Good idea for differentiating the two.
PS. Your picture is is working!
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:29 am
**I think when you say Feedsmith above, you mean FeedBlitz. That’s where your link takes me anyway.
Cheers.
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:12 am
Fixed.
PS 2 out of 2 Grandma’s agree this is a great way to stay in touch
January 11th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
[...] outside of the Facebook feed mentioned above. I use Flickr to manage my photos, that way I can set up email delivery for the older, non-feed generation, give my photo RSS feed to my friends for their Google Reader and integrate it into my Facebook [...]