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Alert messaging (or alert notification) is machine-to-person communication that is important or time-sensitive. An alert may be a calendar reminder or a notification of a new message.
Alert messaging emerged from the study of
Morgan KaufmannAmazon
* Jones, W. & Teevan, J. (Eds.) (2007). ''Personal Information Management''. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. ''Book info at:'
Amazon
{{ISBN, 978-0-295-98737-8
Google Alerts
Personal information managers
Alert messaging (or alert notification) is machine-to-person communication that is important or time-sensitive. An alert may be a calendar reminder or a notification of a new message.
Alert messaging emerged from the study of personal information management
Personal information management (PIM) is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use informational items such as documents (paper-based and digital ...
(PIM), the science of discovering how people perform certain tasks to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information relevant to them. Alert notification is a natural evolution of the concept of RSS
RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...
which makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner. Alerting makes it possible for people to keep up with the information that matters most to them.
Alerts are typically delivered through a notification system
In information technology, a notification system is a combination of software and hardware that delivers a message to a set of recipients. It commonly displays activity related to an account. These systems are an important aspect of modern web ...
and the most common application of the service is machine-to-person communication. Very basic services provide notification services via email or SMS
Short Message Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile phones exchange short text messages, t ...
. More advanced systems (for example AOL
AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc.
The service traces its history to an online ...
) provides users with the choice of selecting a preferred delivery channel such as e-mail, Short Message Service (SMS), instant messaging (IM), via voice through voice portals, desktop alerts and more. Novel approaches provide users with the ability to schedule their own alerts (for example Outlook Calendar). The most sophisticated service providers embrace all capabilities, aggregating a multitude of reminder, notifications and alert, catering the delivery system to the specific context of the content being delivered thus enabling users to create sophisticated scenarios.
Alerts and spam
The notion of content being delivered to users has received negative connotation over the years and is sometimes labeled asspamming
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose (especially phishing), or si ...
, particularly for information that hasn't been requested by the user. The advent of technologies such as RSS
RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...
and now alert notification are an effort directed to creating an antithesis to spam: the information being received by users is exclusively from opt-in requests.
FCC
TheFederal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, internet, wi-fi, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains j ...
is continually working to improve their ability to put in place a notification system in case of emergency, in an attempt to help protect citizens. The first system was the Emergency Broadcast System
The Emergency Broadcast System (EBS), sometimes called the Emergency Action Notification System (EANS), was an Emergency population warning, emergency warning system used in the United States. It was the most commonly used, along with the Local ...
, an emergency warning system in the United States, used from 1963 to 1997, when it was replaced by the Emergency Alert System
The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a Emergency population warning, national warning system in the United States designed to allow authorized officials to broadcast emergency alerts and warning messages to the public via Cable television, cable ...
. On April 9, 2008, the FCC approved an emergency alert text-messaging system so that cellular telephone users can get text message alerts in case of emergencies.
References
* Jones, W. (2008). ''Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management''. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. ''Book info at:'Morgan Kaufmann
* Jones, W. & Teevan, J. (Eds.) (2007). ''Personal Information Management''. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. ''Book info at:'
{{ISBN, 978-0-295-98737-8
See also
*Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user' ...
* AlertOps
External links
Google Alerts
Personal information managers