Ronn! Blankenship wrote: > 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?
Using Mozilla Thunderbird here, for the same purposes. And actually, I'm following the list on gmane, with the NNTP/news interface, so as not to clobber my inbox. I love gmane (http://gmane.org). /c _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
