An email newsletter done right

I've had a couple of questions on my mind lately about my kids. One was whether the new Star Wars and Batman movies might be OK for my son--I know they're PG-13 and he's younger, but would they be OK for him if he saw them with me? The other was a health question that we'd already seen a doctor about, but I was still thinking about it. If I had time, or if they were more urgent, I would have dug around on the web. But as it was, they were just hovering around in my mind.

Then I got my newsletter from ParentCenter. They don't come too often, and sometimes I delete it without reading it (who has time?) but this time I opened it and found a) a parent-oriented movie review of one of the movies, and b) an article on the health topic, after the heading "For your 8-year-old."

Well done! They've found the holy grail of information technology: the right information to the right person at the right time. It starts with good editorial decisions; they chose their subjects well. Then the personalization engine picked the right stuff for me. Then the design and layout got me where I needed to go. And the moderate frequency is just right. If it came too often I'd probably ignore it.

I don't work for them or anything; I'm just a pleased reader. It's nice to see something done right!