File this under The Culture of Instant Outlining
One of the problems in the first go-round on Instant Outlining, in 2002, when we too-quickly opened the doors to all comers, was an assumption I made that if someone had subscribed to me, I was under some kind of obligation to subscribe to him. And that unsubscribing would be like kill-filing someone in a mail list.
The problem with this was that it quickly became like a mail list, and even worse, everyone had a question, or a feature request or a vague bug report, or some other thing that they demanded a response to and got upset if they didn't get one (they started repeating themselves, ever-more-irritably).
If you're the go-to-guy, like I was, that gets old very fast. (The good side of this of course was that people were enthusiastic, and wanted to show off. But it grew too quickly, and overwhelmed me and some of the early people, to the point where it became instantly useless instead of instantly valuable.)
So I want to say this very early in the process:
1. Subscribing to an instant outline is at the subscriber's choice, always.
2. Unsubscribing may not feel good to the person whose outline was unsubbed, but you have to deal with it, it's going to happen, and it's not an insult. Someone tried your feed out, and then wanted to move on. Think of it like unsubbing from an RSS feed.
3. Think of Instant Outlining as workgroup software not public community software. Find a group you like to work with and (most important) likes to work with you.
4. You might be able to subscribe to 500 RSS feeds, but you can probably only subscribe to at most a dozen outlines. So you have to allocate your subscriptions much more carefully. It's like podcasting in a way, you make a greater commitment to an outliner you subscribe to.
5. It might be useful to know that I subscribe to Dave Luebbert and Rogers Cadenhead. If you absolutely need to reach me on something, you can try channeling through them. This may have potential. On the other hand there may come a day when I unsub from them, even though it's hard to forsee.
I'm thinking of different social structures as we bootstrap this. Maybe something like the groups-of-eight we did with DaveNet, where with each piece you got a random group of eight people copied, and sometimes interesting conversations would develop, over a period of weeks.
In any case, you always have the right to unsub, and no one has the right to bitch about it if you do. Point them to this post if they doubt you.
