Re: lists v. Usenet v. BBS ...

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Craig" == C Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    Craig> On Tue, 27 Aug 1996, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
    >> coordinate dozens of TLUG-like lists so that FAQs from TLUG
    >> could propagate to KLUG and NYLUG and so on.

    Craig> If the conversation the was situated on a web-based BBS
    Craig> instead of news, there could be conferences for each
    Craig> physically located club and topics for each discussion
    Craig> thread within each conference.  Each conference and each
    Craig> individual topic could be hyperlinked to every other note
    Craig> so that discussions could move from TLUG to NYLUG and back
    Craig> again.

Usenet already has this (even primitive hyperlinks---it's called
cross-posting) and with a Web browser interface such as Netscape,
naive users don't really realize that it's not the same underlying
mechanism as Web pages.

Usenet's experience says that allowing discussions to move back and
forth is a BadThang[tm].  It tends to even out the content across
fora, lowering the common denominator and chasing away the wizards in
the process.

    Craig> I think there also needs to be a discussion group of club
    Craig> officers from each club where there would be a centralized

Aha, a volunteer!  Craig, you're the closest thing to an officer we
have (I think?), so *you're it*!!  For he's a jolly good fel-low, for
he's a jolly good fel-low, for he's a jolly good fEL-LOW, ....  Yada,
eh, Craig?

No, this imposes too much on the club officers, I think, especially
the two guys or gals out of 10 or 20 who actually work on the FAQs and 
search engine.

It's a good idea if there are volunteers.  Volunteers are not so hard
to find, especially in small social circles.  But I'm thinking about
something that works a little bit even if there aren't volunteers.
Something that is automated so that it scales: this means that one
volunteer can see the returns from their effort get bigger and bigger,
and not get diluted by guzu postings.  This is how you get and keep
professional volunteers like 'tale' (anybody know who 'tale' is?) and
'Linus'.

    Craig> FAQ repository with a flat file search engine or some other
    Craig> type of easy to implement search method.

    Craig> The problem is getting people to move from e-mail to a BBS
    Craig> style discussion forum.

Fascist!!!!  :-)  Seriously, "getting people to move" is not the
problem, IMHO, of course.  My idea is not to get more people together.
Usenet is a place where lots of people can get together, and the user
interface gets better all the time.  IRC and equivalents work well,
too.  My idea is to get the information together.  The problem is
getting information that has relatively long lifetimes (eg, the
"Software Uvatims" page) and high specificity (most TLUGers are
already running v2.0, so we don't care about that info anymore; new
members will probably grab a 2.0-based distribution) to go where the
people who want it are.  That's probably not going to happen, for a
while anyway.  So what we want is a way to find it more easily---it
goes to some central place (or rather, it hangs out on the same server 
it's always been on, and registers itself somewhere).

Besides, email and netnews have huge advantages for the near future
for most people.  They don't require a continuous online presence,
which is expensive for most people.  They don't require high-quality
no-fault connections.  With appropriate user agents, they don't
require moving anything except the information specifically requested
over narrow channels.  And they come to you upon request.  You don't
go out to them.

Hanashi ga chigau kedo, if you want to work on moving to a BBS-style
discussion forum, that's fine with me.  I have some preference for a
mailing list/newsgroup so that I can stay in Mule, but if it moves to
a web-based BBS I'll just fire up w3.el (or whatever it is).  I'm even
willing to contribute some programming time or whatever.  My point is
that IMHO that's not a killer app.  That's an incremental
improvement---maybe a big increment---but incremental nonetheless.

One advantage to the Web-based approach, of course, is that we can
more easily include images, audio, even JavaScript animations, in our
discussions.  I don't know whether that would be useful or not.  It
would be interesting to explore, though.

Steve
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