Hi Ben, > Email lists are nice because they're better at nudging folks >to participate, by making messages intrusively land in their inbox...
IMO the email-list convenience is a made-up excuse for bad habits and laziness - some may claim that they use dial-up Internet via 33.6 ISA modem with IE3 on a 486DX 133, that's why they prefer emails. IMHO any forum is more convenient, especially for reading and for following particular fields of interests, and also it's not true that receiving all the messages in your mailbox is strictly desirable - sometimes there's a lot of spam, I myself unsubscribed a long time ago. Every forum has subscriptions for notifications on the email for answers (I guess also new topics) (e.g. PhpBB), one can follow a thread or a category etc. (and receive notifications only for what he cares about). ... As of sending through the email - what's that harder about a forum? Login once, keep logged in if lazy, one or a few clicks on a topic, "reply" etc. Put an icon of the forum in your start-page of the browser, make the page to start with your browser (or one of your browsers) - and you won't forget to check it, if that's the issue. Besides, a lot of the communication here is like in a chat - a few lines, the ones who make more efforts are often ignored or answered in a few lines - there are probably supposed to be crazy to write that much. *IMHO the "inconvenience" of a forum is just an excuse for a very low commitment or interest.* You know, I've created an AGI forum with carefully designed categories*more than an year ago *, there are even multi-language categories and categories for different level of expertise. I have mentioned it here several times - the interest is close to 0, a few fellow Bulgarian AGI-guys joined, I've used it a few times, but no body else uses it actively and I stopped posting there, too. *Scalable Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Forum - Self-Improving General Intelligence (SIGI) * *-- Independent Scalable AGI and SIGI Society Forum - Created & Maintained by Todor Arnaudov (Alpha Version) * http://research.twenkid.com/forum/index.php There are neither people, nor interest, and it's about lack of commitment and no real interest in AGI, people care for their boring university courses, jobs etc. Otherwise if it's technically hard for the AGI guys to use a forum (and that's their excuse for not using it) - well, perhaps that's the reason why many of them still believe intelligence is a mystery. ** Todor "Tosh" Arnaudov ** * ... Twenkid Research:* http://research.twenkid.com ... *Self-Improving General Intelligence Conference*: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-sigi-2012-1-first-sigi-agi.html ... * Todor Arnaudov's Researches Blog**: * http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
