On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 02:07:51PM -0400, Sean McBride wrote: >You might want to take a look at Friendfeed.com as a medium for conducting >political discussions or any kind of discussion. I spend much more time on >Friendfeed now than on Yahoo Groups -- my feed is here: >http://friendfeed.com/seanmcbride
Mailing-lists have six great advantages over forums like Friendfeed: 1. All of the messages I'm interested in are gathered in a single place. I'm on about 40 lists, and all the messages -- about 800/day -- come to a single mail account. My mail program lists them one per line, and I just scan down the Subject column and choose which ones I want to read (about 5-10% of them). I leave the messages in the mail file on my disk, and start a new file (and save the old one) every few months when it gets up to 2 gigabytes. If these messages were in forums, I'd have to go to 40 different web pages every day to read them, and they might not be listed one per line. It would take several times longer, and be far more tedious, to scan them all. I would not have copies of the messages on my own computer so I wouldn't be able to search through them later. 2. I can do very precise and versatile searches on the current and past mail files, so they are one of my main data resources. The search terms can specify substrings in the Subject, sender, and text, also date and flags. 3. I can permanently flag messages in the mail file as important for future reference. On subsequent searches, one of the search terms can specify that only flagged messages be shown. Forums don't have this feature. 4. Mail messages that I've looked at are marked as read, so I know I don't have to look at them again. Forums don't do that. 5. I can totally delete messages that I don't want to see any more. You can't do that in forums. 6. I filter out messages from people who have proved to never say anything I'm interested in (also spammers), so I never see them. That saves me a lot of time and effort. You can't do that in forums either. I have a preset search that I can invoke at any time that shows me only messages explicitly addressed to me, and those flagged as important, and those that I have sent. Using this search I see all my personal and most important e-mails. I can immediately browse with Firefox to any URL mentioned in an e-mail, or to any HTML attachment in the mail. All this functionality is obtained with the Mutt mail program and the Procmail filtering/processing program under Linux. Presumably good mail programs running on other operating systems can perform similar functions. There have been a couple of lists I was receiving that switched over to forums in the past (despite my pointing out the above facts to the owners). Regrettably, I no longer receive that information. I don't have time to go to those forums, remember which topics and messages I've read, and scan for new ones to read. It would probably take 10 times as long per message to do that on a forum as it does in my mail file. And since I have many other things to do every day in addition to reading new messages, I can't afford to spend the extra time it would take.
