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 of the activities people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages, and email mes ...
(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 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 provides a means of delivering a message to a set of recipients. It commonly shows activity related to an account. Such systems constitute an important ...
and the most common application of the service is machine-to-person communication. Very basic services provide notification services via email or
SMS. More advanced systems (for example
AOL) 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 as
spamming
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose (especia ...
, particularly for information that hasn't been requested by the user. The advent of technologies such as
RSS 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
The
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdicti ...
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 Broadcasting System or the Emergency Action Notification System (EANS), was an emergency warning system used in the United States. It replaced the previous CONELRAD system an ...
, 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 national warning system in the United States designed to allow authorized officials to broadcast emergency alerts and warning messages to the public via cable, satellite, or broadcast television, and bot ...
. 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 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
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