While cleaning out some old email I ran across this October TBTF newsletter (always worthwhile in its own right) that had an article about takeitoffline.com - I provide relevant excerpts below. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: off-topic threads can be pursued via a URL trivially created for the purpose, rather than cluttering the primary mailing list. It's not a perfect solution but it's at least worth considering. As a demonstration I have created a URL for this very topic: http://www.takeitoffline.com/1/H/OkANUhEaoVGHilCdLf.html The rest of this message is excerpted from that TBTF newsletter: TBTF for 1999-10-05: Offlist T a s t y B i t s f r o m t h e T e c h n o l o g y F r o n t Timely news of the bellwethers in computer and communications technology that will affect electronic commerce -- since 1994 Your Host: Keith Dawson ISSN: 1524-9948 This issue: < http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-10-05.html > To comment on this issue, please visit this page at Take It Offline: < http://www.takeitoffline.com/1/H/RsNRIBn9EJCQYhlafHO.html > ________________________________________________________________________ B e n e f a c t o r s TBTF is free. If you get value from this publication, please visit the TBTF Benefactors page < http://tbtf.com/the-benefactors.html > and consider contributing to its upkeep. ________________________________________________________________________ C o n t e n t s Transmeta aims squarely at Intel ICANN, NSI, Commerce kiss and make up US cryptography export rules eased 97 >> 512 A working Israeli quantum computer (not) Take It Offline: enhancing online discussion Neural network said to beat people at speech recognition Quick bits and followups Amazon's zShops Google site comes out of beta Eclipse followups On trusting code Egg hunt ________________________________________________________________________ . . . . . . ..Take It Offline: enhancing online discussion New free service should prove a boon to list managers, members, and those in need of ad hoc groupware Last week Internicity, Inc. released Take It Offline [21]. TBTF is proud to offer you this exclusive first look. (Full disclosure: Steve Yost, Internicity's principal, is a TBTF Irregular [22] and a friend of mine. I offered him ideas and advice from the earliest days of Take It Offline, and the TBTF Irregulars supplied beta feedback. I don't have any financial interest in Internicity.) TIO provides a convenient, lightweight venue for ad-hoc, online group discussions. Did someone on your mailing list just raise an off-topic but intriguing idea? In less than a minute you can create a private TIO discussion space and post its URL to your list. Then anyone interested in following the diversionary thread can parti- cipate at Take It Offline. The mailing list stays focused. Once the TIO discussion winds down, the thread stays live, so you get no 404s from a mailing list's Web archive or from search spiders. TIO can be useful in the absence of a mailing list. Say you need to coordinate a seminar schedule involving 10 people. You can cre- ate a TIO space and mail its URL to the 10 individuals, then work out the details in Take It Offline. Those who wish to can get email each time a note is added to the discussion; a daily digest is also available. The site is lean and speedy, light on graphics, clean and attrac- tive. The privacy policy is featured prominently and it is aggres- sively visitor-friendly. Posters to TIO can use any name they like; no registration or passwords are required. An email address is needed only to start a thread. Cookies are used only for visitor convenience; the site works fine if you refuse them. In deference to the recent Jargon Scout entry [23], Internicity has also registered the name Takeitofflist.com. Take It Offline can provide a free forum for mailing lists, such as this one, that don't offer threaded discussions. Let's try it now. Visit this TIO space [24] if you want to explore TIO's implications for the dynamics of mailing lists or the workings of hypertexts. I'll be following this thread closely and posting to it from time to time. [21] http://www.takeitoffline.com/ [22] http://tbtf.com/the-irregulars.html [23] http://tbtf.com/jargon-scout.html#e2e [24] http://www.takeitoffline.com/1/H/emxb7z9ubBnT5eAuc8l.html . . . . . . . S o u r c e s > For a complete list of TBTF's email and Web sources, see http://tbtf.com/sources.html . ________________________________________________________________________ TBTF home and archive at http://tbtf.com/ . To (un)subscribe send the message "(un)subscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] TBTF is Copy- right 1994-1999 by Keith Dawson, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Commercial use prohibited. For non-commercial purposes please forward, post, and link as you see fit. _______________________________________________ Keith Dawson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk. ********************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the *body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter: unsubscribe gnhlug **********************************************************
