Last Friday I wrote about a couple high profile blogging opportunities and pondered if I should drop the ZDNet folks a line and say I would likely be interested. After a couple encouraging reader comments (thank you), I decided ok, why not fire off an email and see what they had to say?

Having not received even a “got it” email reply I just decided a few minutes ago to send a follow-up email, this time using my Gmail account.

I also noticed that their post still doesn’t have any comments or trackbacks and according to my blog software I did send them a trackback. So did they never receive? The contact person is listed as David Grober. Mr. Grober, if you happen to run a vanity RSS search and happen to read this did you ever receive my email?

If Mr. Grober, one of his assistants or frankly anybody else at ZDnet would write back with “no thanks” or “you aren’t right for us” or “your mother wears army boots!” or anything really besides dead air then that’s good enough for me.

Then again this could be a great example of how broken email is these days.

What next?
I don’t need an additional blogging gig, of course, but I have an idea for a blog that I believe would fit their format, assuming they wanted to do it and liked the details I sent them. This ship will sail at some point and I will likely do it on my own elsewhere or with somebody else if too much more time goes by and no response.

I will continue to update this thread with what’s happening on this until either I give up on them and do this blog myself or receive an answer back. Maybe I should setup a blog and just blog about this every few days until I get a response?

Could that be the new 2006 way to get somebody’s attention? Just start a blog about it and blog about it so there is an actual, believable virtual trail? The problem with email is that the other side can always say: we never got it. With blogs, RSS, that isn’t so easy to do. And if they do vanity searches on their names, then maybe the blogging efforts can turn up in technorati/Feedster/IceRocket, etc so the person can be alerted that wait a minute, somebody is trying to reach them about something.

This isn’t about being annoying or impatient, BTW, it’s a genuine concern that the other party actually does see the response, which can be a problem with some overly aggressive spam filters. I’m liking this idea the more I type about it.

Any holes in this line of thinking?

Update 11:39am PST: Should have added this to the original post. The Army boots reference came from a friend I was having an argument with one time. In the middle of the heat he just blurts out: “Your mother wears Army boots!” I stopped and cracked up. What a great argument breaker!

Update 2:08pm PST: Received a polite “no” response. I guess if the first response gets nowhere you send another one. Can’t say I didn’t try.

BTW, is this proof that email doesn’t get the feedback as quickly as blog posts do? Six days and no response via email, a couple hours an email response confirming that not only was the first email received, but a response to the second one and indication that this very post was read.

Hmm indeed!

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