I'm working at a company that is slow to embrace new technologies and best practices. I worry about this, because I was given the green light to rewrite a large part of the codebase in the current version of one of the the languages we use (Actionscript 3). The rewrite was largely complete a couple of months ago, but I am still the only person who has touched it.
I periodically send out links to blog posts and articles that touch on some of the concepts I've incorporated that I haven't seen evidence of in the existing codebase. I usually receive absolutely no response from these attempts, so I have no idea if the other developers are poring over the links with interest, deleting them unread, or what. I don't want to look like a know-it-all, but I also feel like there is a lot of foundational knowledge that I'll need to provide for them before they can use the new system.
We're all remote, so I don't know my coworkers as well as I'd like. In a good month, we meet once a month and the meeting is usually scheduled to the hilt, with no place to discuss things like adopting better practices. Ironically, I feel like we'd have more time/room to discuss such practices if we would adopt more of them. However, it's difficult to bring this up without sounding like I'm criticizing the developers who have been there longer than I have.
I guess the small question is: should I take the complete silence when I send links as a hint and stop doing it? The larger question is, what's a tactful way to educate the rest of the team in concepts I feel are important for them to know to build code that we can all work in efficiently?
Edit to respond to question: I usually email the entire team, so as not to be singling out a particular person. I might IM the link if there's some reason it's specifically of interest to that person. I'll usually send out links as I find them, and this will vary in frequency from once or twice a week to once a month (probably an average of once every two weeks or so).
More edits to address the questions about the types of links I send out. (I tried to keep this more of a generic question, so that it could be useful for others, but let's make this "about me" ;)
For example, after the meeting where I pitched fr being able to rewrite the codebase and got the green light, I sent out a group of links, mostly from my archives at O'Reilly, that offered foundational principles that I'd be building upon.
In the old codebase, when I got tired of doing screen captures of the menu for the part of our instructions where we walk them through what the parts of the Assessment are, I rewrote the menu so that it could just be used in the walkthrough (with the added benefit of allowing cool animations during the walkthrough), and summarized what I'd done, how to use it, and how it saves time (you don't have to redo the screencaptures and replace the old ones every time the menu changes, which happens a lot).
I was talking to another dev on an IM, and asked rhetorically "Have you ever heard of the Single Responsibility Priciple" (expecting "yes, but I didn't use it here because..."). When he said no, I sent him a link to the Wikipedia definition.
We have a lot of pressure from our customers to move to HTML5. When I returned from a recent JavaScript meetup, I posted a link to ToDoMVC with the comment "This site provides implementations of some of the major JS frameworks, which could really help us decide which Framework to use."
Final edits. I want to thank everyone that responded. I don't think I can mark any of the answers as "correct," because I didn't get an "aha!" out of any of these. The best suggestion, I think, came from Matt's comment that maybe it's time to take the bull by the horns and ask to be team lead. But it's not an answer, so I can't mark it correct.