Ron Watson wrote: > > What are the Yahoo groups core values and how do we transmit them to > > > the newbies and other folks stepping up to the camcorder? > > While I love this group and find the information to be totally > priceless, I find this juxtaposition that Steve puts up here to be > quite interesting. > > We're doing all of our serious business at the Wal-Mart of the net, a > Yahoo Group. > > It's pretty ironic, really. > > All the reliance that we have on the Open Source Community, all the > talk of grassroots and content creator control, and here we are > spending hours and hours on a Yahoo List. > > Talk about flushing stuff down the memory hole. > > These lists were not meant to be communities. > > They are dysfunctional on their face, and are really only suitable > for announcements and such. > Hi, Ron.
You present some interesting points. I both agree and disagree with some of these statements. In particular, I have been finding great communities in these groups since before they belonged to Yahoo! (used to be called e-groups back around 2000). on the other hand, there is indeed room for much improvement and it looks to me like Yahoo! is very interested in hearing how they can be improved. for example, check out: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006541.html I had a great conversation with the groups product manager on Friday. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that he's a member of this group so know that they are indeed listening. Perhaps you can elaborate on the dysfunctional elements. For obvious reasons, I will leave it to them to share any future plans. But i can say that they are doing many exciting things and think a lot about groups from a community point of view. As for openness, there are many forms: open-source, open-API's, etc. Many of us use tools like Blogger, Flickr, Blip.tv, Internet Archive, Fireant, Mefeedia, SpinXpress, Google Maps, Feedburner and other great services and tools. (Pardon me if I left out anyone's favorite example) None of these are open-source, but all are open API which allows us to mash up some great applications. As for open-source, I think a lot of it is great (and as with anything, much of it is not). I'm becoming a Drupal geek out of necessity and I both love it and hate it. Can I just change it in anyway if I need to? In theory yes, in practice maybe not. Or at least maybe not easily. Not just Drupal, same for Wordpress, Joomla and others. It's not just a skills issue. There are many reasons why even open source can be very limiting at times. In a sense, most of my house is open source, but that does not necessarily make it easy to add another room. There are many other considerations. one more thing: unless it changed recently, we are mirroring this list on Google. Ok, so that's like keeping another copy at K-Mart or some Wal-mart competitor, but at least it's a step to avoid the memory hole syndrome you mentioned. Thanks for pointing out Scoop. I had not seen that before. I will def check it out. I would be interested in know what particular features you like besides the open-source ness. Regards, Markus p.s., referring to an earlier email: i would definitely pay for your vids if I could get my wife Alicia's Shelties a little training! Any chance we can get you out to the digital dojo for a combined vlog/dog workshop? :) -- Markus Sandy http://node101.org http://ourmedia.org http://spinxpress.com http://apperceptions.org http://havemoneywillvlog.com [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
