I was catching up on the last day or so of messages and was going to
reply to a couple of specific messages but I got caught up in reading
and got to really thinking about the various experiences and opinions
that have been expressed.
I think Chuq said it best when he essentially said it's all subjective.
No matter which technology you choose to use or are stuck with using, it
its effectiveness can be directly correlated to how pro-active its owner
is. And then I got to thinking about who really is the "owner".
I made a comment at one point that mailing lists are not inflexible,
it's the management interface. I think this comment applies generally
but I also think there are two management interfaces to consider: admin
and subscriber.
Somewhere along the way in my reading I realized that it's not about
mailing lists versus newsgroups versus chat rooms versus whatever, it's
about an "owner" achieving their goals or realizing their expectations.
And there are at least two legitimate "owners" of any discussion: there
is the person who manages the conduit and the person who receives what's
dumped in it.
When their goals and expectations overlap perfectly I don't think it
matters which technology you use, recognizing that some technologies
will support certain goals and expectations better than others. But
when they have even a few differences -- e.g., anyone can post to my
discussion, including spammers, versus I don't want spam -- then the
choice of technology can matter a great deal, because some technologies
support the conduit manager (e.g., mailing lists) better than the
subscriber (e.g., newsgroups). I'm explicitly setting aside add-on
support that's not an integral part of a base techology.
So, what we really need is a technology or service that gives the
conduit owner fine-grained control of the operation and content of a
discussion, *and* gives the same control to a subscriber for controlling
their inflow.
Chuq, isn't this essentially what you're after in your experiment?
Jim
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