Does anyone still read email newsletters?

As Penny and I ponder what sort of marketing content we are going to produce for LloydLaw over and above blog content, I see that high-profile blogger Robert Scoble, co-author of the The Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, is predicting the end of the email newsletter. He says that "getting people to subscribe to an email newsletter is sssooo 1990s".

It's an interesting view because it bears out my own experience of receiving email newsletters, which I invariably never read. One gets a sense that the effort that goes into creating them might be disproportionate to the benefit that they provide. It's just one of those things that businesses do without really thinking about the true value to customers, clients or themselves.