At 05:42 PM Wednesday 10/22/2008, Bruce Bostwick wrote: >On Oct 22, 2008, at 5:33 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: > > > One problem is that compared to an e-mail list like this, most of the > > "web-based communities" have too rigid a structure, while this is > > much like an informal conversation where one person says something > > and then someone else responds, etc., and there may be different > > individual conversations going on between subsets of the group at the > > same time, etc. > >And too rigid a structure can be a community-killer, as I've seen >happen more than once over more than 25 years. Online communities >that rely on the technology to structure the communication too >tightly, as well as the ones that are very strict on enforcing >topicality, tend to have low populations, and going from less >structure to more structure or radically altering the technology base >of the community can trigger population crashes as people are driven >off by the hassle factor. The e-list format does very much resemble a >conversation, as well as some degree of cross-pollination between >conversation threads, and the blog format can sometimes isolate the >topical threads *too* much.
That was the objection on the other list, including the fact that a small group would choose the topics of the various blog threads and approve all responses. (The e-mail list was and is moderated, but as it happens many of those who had been on the list for 10 years or better had also known each other in RL beginning as much as 25 or more years ago, while those who were going to be in charge of the blog system were by comparison relative newcomers. (Yeah, it's complicated, and I'm trying to avoid compromising some peoples' privacy by not going into all of the specifics . . . )) > > Also, as someone has mentioned, many people prefer having the > > messages come to them (as on a list like this) rather than them > > having to remember to look somewhere else for them . . . > >Now, this isn't necessarily a problem if you set the RSS feed up >right. (I follow several online communities from my mail client, >which can import RSS feeds along with mail accounts. Which mail client would that be, if you don't mind saying? . . . ronn! :) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
