John Osmon wrote:
Let me preafce my words with the thought that I find the most of the new
wikis, forums, and whatnots are poor substitutes for searchable text
archives.
Agreed.
However, I learned most of my foundation material from Usenet
in the late 80s and early 90s, so I might be biased...
Ditto.
On Sun, Aug 02, 2009 at 06:51:07AM -0700, e ninja wrote:
Gert,
So if we apply your thought process, there is no value in capturing and
organizing re-usable intellectual capital? I guess you must think Wikipedia
is useless and we should just trawl through the web and layers of email
threads to find simple answers to questions that have already been answered?
You're putting words in Gert's mouth suggesting he derides the valuable
(free) services available. I've never met Gert, but would buy him a
beer if I found we were in the same room. Gert and others have helped
me (and others) countless times without need of any of the tools you
espouse -- so there is already value present without need for more
work...
Agreed, and I'd buy him two. Issues brought to this list should be
discussed on this list and hopefully resolved on this list. A "Go over
there for the answer" response fragments discussion and actually tends
to make future searches for the same information less likely to succeed
as information on the web changes, links break, etc.
A response of "Go over there for the answer" from someone with a vested
interest in "Over there" is nothing more than an advertisement for "Over
there".
Back to the main point:
There is value -- but who has to exert energy, and who reaps the
benefits?
Those looking for the information have to exert the energy, those trying
to commercialize it reap the benefits.
The value of any list is to share knowledge. If there are free tools out
there like mysolvr (a user-generated knowledge-base), that also allows us to
go the extra mile of documenting and organizing re-usable know-how for the
benefit of others, it is worth the effort.
Yes, there is likely value in organizing the info. However, is the
marginal value greater than the marginal cost? I'm of the opinion
that most of the people reading this list and the archives believe
that it works well as it is.
Agreed.
We have to work smarter, not harder.
Absolutely! However, I think that you've got a hard hill in front of
you trying to change the behavior of people using this list.
And the smart way to work is to avoid fragmenting the information. The
hard way is to fragment it among diffuse sites. The ethical way is to
resist hijacking threads to promote one's own website.
A smarter approach might be to start moving the data to your preferred
site on your own. Perhaps even building automated tools to do so. If
your idea catches on, you could very well end up with a reputation and
following like Jared and/or Gert. Until that occurs, I have doubts
that the wealth of info on cisco-nsp will be transferred to
another medium...
He doesn't want to move the information to his site on his own. He
wants us to do it for him. This began over a year ago with scraping
cisco-nsp for email addresses and spamming them with "invitations". It
went mostly under-the-radar until his spambot went nuts and flooded its
victims with multiple invitations at once. Faded under the radar again
and now he's back hawking the sister site.
(With that said, I'd be happy to be proven wrong -- more knowledge is
better! I don't, however, think that I'd get enough out of the
process to spend my time doing any of the prep work...)
Agreed. And it fragments the information.
--
Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - j...@impulse.net
Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/
Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
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