Elective 8--Newsletters

Assignment

Write a 100 word summary, description, evaluation and recommendation on the usefulness of each of the two newsletters to which you subscribed. Include the URL where you subscribed.

For this elective, I chose to subscribe to two newsletters that had absolutely nothing to do with education and teaching. I browsed the Internet for some sites that were part of my personal interests and I subscribed to the newsletters through those sites.

Baseball Prospectus:

	I actually learned about this website from a book I was reading about baseball. I am a huge baseball fan and I like to read about baseball, specifically the stats and the numbers behind everything. (I have read the Physics of Baseball--I would like to tell you that it has improved my game, but, sadly, it hasn't.) I play fantasy baseball every year with a group of friends of mine. And I thought this website and its newsletter would be of great help to me. I doubt that my friends would find something like this, as this is a site for serious baseball stat junkies. So, I thought it might give me an advantage. Do date, I have not reaped any rewards (i.e. I have not won the championship.) But, I have improved my knowledge a great deal.
	The newsletter comes everyday during the baseball season. I love it. There is a place for stats--the top five players at a given position. This gets updated regularly based on how the player is hitting. The baseball draft was just held and there is a section that breaks down the draft team by team.
	I should mention that the newsletter is not complete when it comes to my inbox. The titles and very beginnings of articles are sent to me. Then there is a link to the rest of the article on the web page. The only inconvenience with this is that I have to sign in every time I link to an article. (So, sometimes, I just go to the site to read the articles, but I like the way the newsletter organizes things.)

Gardening:

	I am a very big gardener. I have a large yard and I love to go outside and play in the soil. (Unfortunately, I have had little time this spring to play. Time should be freed up soon, say June 20!!!) I spent some time on the Internet looking for gardening newsletters. There are many. And, I already subscribe to some of them. But, I thought that I would subscribe to a new one and review that one.
	Let me first start out by saying that I was very wary about signing up for a newsletter on about.com. Something tells me that I will be barraged with unsolicited e-mails from them. So, the first thing I did was to make sure I read all of the details about the subscription. What information do they send to third party? How often would they contact me? etc.
	I have been pretty pleased with the newsletter from that aspect. I have gotten the newsletter now for a couple of weeks. There are some genuinely good articles on it. But, again, it is not the complete article. There is a link to the complete article on about.com. I guess that is the troubling part. I think that I just don't like that site. Too many ads on it. I never click on the ads. (Or, if I do, I do it from a computer at school--I know that they collect IP addresses. So, I try to limit my home computer's IP address. It just makes me feel safer.)
	I am please with the content of the newsletter. There are some good articles. Some of the articles are a bit elementary, but that is common. Many of the magazines are written this way as well.