On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 12:54:00PM -0500, zachary rosen wrote: > > The issue was mailing lists vs. web boards; you will note that I *said* > > that weblogg-y stuff should be syndicated by RSS. > > Doing the mailinglist as Usenet is a very interesting idea. The problem > is, obviously, spam. But - being able to quickly browse / hop around all > the different mailing lists would be a very useful thing.
Well, if you run your own NNTP servers, it's likely to be *easier* to kill spam, I should think. > I don't think we could use NNTP to do it though unless we used it to just > mirror the mails. Could we make some central mail indexing service that > signed up to all the mailinglists and aggregated / displayed them all in a > reasonable fashion? Something of this sort is actualy being used right > now to archive this mailing lists (see the links off the hack4dean > "mailinglist" page). Bidirectional gating between newsgroups and mailing lists is *well* understood by now -- another advantage of Getting the Glue Right. As, for that matter, is indexing netnews traffic. And, indeed, if you're running the servers yourself, your indexing facility could provide news:// links that would permit users to avoid the impedance mismatch between the powerful Usenet-based toolsets and the usually-less-powerful (and almost always differing) web-front-end toolsets. And, to clarify again, my goal is to stamp out web-bulletin-boards as a tool for doing what is, essentially, netnews. They're usually not especially powerful, and they're *different* almost everywhere. They're inefficient to use, and worse inefficient to learn. You can't cache them locally, which means you're dependent on external sources for searching tools, and they're just not as evolved (task-wise) as even the Windows newsreaders, let alone the Unix ones. This is another of those split-constituency problems: I'd bet that the Dean-online audience will be close to 25% power-users, and such people tend to be opinion-leaders against their flock. If you can make life easier for them without making it appreciably more difficult for yourself, it's always A Good Thing. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c
