Let me add: I am seeing much more dynamic and creative energy in Friendfeed conversations these days than on Yahoo Groups.
On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 5:26 PM, Mark S Bilk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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. > > >
