Email’s ‘read receipt’ function can be invaluable. Not only does it tell you that someone has read your email, it can also tell you that someone hasn’t read it – and, of the two, this latter option can be the more revealing.

Recently, I sent out some stories – of a training/ e-learning nature – on behalf of some clients of mine. Today came news that these had been deleted, unread by those at TrainingZone.

If you run a website and ezine service that purports to focus on the training world, and especially on the latest developments in that world, you would think that you would at least want to keep up-to-date about the latest products, trends and so on in that sector – even if your site doesn’t carry overt news and you decided not to pursue the news you read by commissioning a feature to tackle that trend, approach and so on. TrainingZone, however, has obviously decided to simplify the procedure by just not even reading the news in the first place. However, my ‘read receipts’ tell me that other publications and websites don’t take a similar approach.

So – in a perverse echo of the TV news when announcing the football results – if you don’t want to know what’s new in the world of training, you should probably keep reading the output of TrainingZone.