Hello again. OK - first of all I hate mailing lists. I don't consider them to be a valid form of communication for anything but the people doing the coding and don't really consider them of much use at all unless there is no other alternative. Except one - and that is when there needs to be something communicated to the people doing the work and it has to get through - in other words I think mailing lists are a last resort.
I've been a part of a few areas of the net where what I was involved with just took off. One of them was in 1999 when Flash 4 came out and suddenly anyone with an ability to use Flash was hot and Flash was the big news and I was part of a forum called "were-here.com" which was the "adult" flash forum as opposed to the kids' "flashkit.com" site. My name was/is Mapp and for the most part of were-here's life I was moderator of the XML forum. I think that if anyone has or cares to read my posts they'll see that I always try to help, my help was usually complete, I am always polite. We had quite a ride for awhile but then the owners of the forum for some secretive reason just took the site down leaving the thousands of contributing posters "homeless". I still keep up with all the XML stuff and I suppose I must be sort of an expert in XML - at least in knowing the different formats, vxml, aiml, on and on. I was also part of a few areas of the net where it looked like things were going to take off and never did. One thing I noticed is that technologies that take off have forums dedicated to them and ones that don't take off resist going off the mailing list. I like it how people say "take it off list" but oh where should it be taken to please? Nobody says "take the discussion to the wiki" because traditionally wikis aren't real discussion areas. What really should be said is "take it to the forum" but there isn't really one is there? If there is nobody says anything. I have the name "nutchforum.com" and am #1 in MSN, Google and Yahoo and one person posted there one day. I know there are other efforts too but if they have any good discussions about relevant topics I'm unaware of them. I agree that the people doing the coding shouldn't have to read this and so obviously I'm proposing a nutch forum with myself for example (could be others too) as a moderator. At least I have a history and it is decent. Were-here.com is back up now - bought by a corporation and maintained as a learning resource to the Flash community but I don't post there much and that is because I resented my hundreds if not thousands of hours of painstakingly trying to give back to "the community" by being complete, coherent, etc lost because whoever happened to have the "luck" of owning the forum decided that oh well, see you around, I'm going to work for Microsoft, or whatever. I still resent it even if some corporation knew that they could garner enough good will by buying the forum and restoring the posts/knowlege base. So, what I've done is pick "Moodle" - an open source php learning system, which has a forum and I've decided that I'll attempt to start a useful forum and that what I'll do is every week or two make the forum sql dump available so if I ever decide that I don't care about anyone or I get snapped up by Google any knowlege will live on. Moodle is being developed by teachers, the people I'd trust to do things right (except for librarians - check out the open source library software that librarians write for an example of a dominant open source effort). So I assume that any forum posting will be long-lived and "free". I've also decided to pay for posts - the surest way for a forum/community to not get started is by there being no posting activity. So, I arranged to get posts paid for. I'm not sure yet how much is reasonable but I started off figuring that a few dollars for a well thought out question and 20 -100 dollars for a reasonably comprehensive answer might be alright. Also, I've arranged for some hosting space for people who want to make search engines but don't have the resources. I have a few dedicated servers and unique IP addresses and the like for people who will share their experiences. I don't know what is reasonable to pay but I have arranged some funding and resources albeit with conditions. Also there are other things that normally cost money as well as I'll give support to people who want to use the "web interface" that I've been working on and if somebody else has an idea that needs a little money well right now the people that I've set up with older not so up to date nutch search engines are becoming desperate to get the stuff I told them would be available to them. These aren't people who want billion page indexes spread over 10 separate beowulf clusters - they're just people who thought they could spend a few hundred and get some additional functionality out of open source software. That being what I do mostly, set up and integrate open source software for people who have reasonable goals. I'm old now and not as competitive as I once might have been. Anyway, I agree this discussion should go off list - if anyone cares to go to http://www.nutchforum.com I will discuss/help/be helped there. Thanks again to the people who work on nutch. Greg.
