At 7:43 PM -0700 6/11/98, Mike Nolan wrote:
> I agree with this, but only up to a point. The problem is net bandwidth
> is still an exhaustible resource, and one that we list managers (or for
> most of us, our ISP's) have to pay more for as usage increases.
Agreed. One rason why a lot of my focus is on ways of increasing the
efficiency of the information transferred.
Mail lists are a push technology. They're more efficient than usenet,
which is the ultimate in push technlogies (send every by to every
computer in case ANY person on ANY computer wants to view it, just in
case), but there are ways to improve that efficiency further, both
through building ways to let a user further refine the granularity of
the information retrieved, and to build in things like HTML-click-in
table of contents instead of sending the entire message.
I'm not saying make these things mandatory, but there are a lot of
things we can do to improve ease of use and cut bandwidth overhead
while ADDING flexibility to the end user.
> > They will and are. Although frankly, USENET is dead, although NNTP is
> > still quite useful. that's a distinction people miss...
>
> Like Bob Hope, and before him Mark Twain, announcing the death of net news
> is still somewhat premature. With over 500,000 posts a day, it is hardly
> dying,
No, USENET is dead. Like a huge dinosaur with its head cut off, it's
still running around stomping things becuase the rear end hasn't
ifgured out it's time to fall over. Size and volume are not measures of
USABILTY. Yes, there's lots of stuff in it. How much of it is usable?
> NNTP based world. However, I believe that in the minds of most net users,
> including those of us who date back to Bnews days or even earlier, the term
> USENET applies equally to both forms, and Chuq is himself guilty of
> confusing the transport layer with the application layer here.
Not at all. I define USENET as that thing out there we read with our
news readers. You're trying, I think, to protect me from taking a stand
I heartily want to take -- that USENET as a communications scheme has
grown to the point where the noise overwhelms all. It continues to
operate, but not necessarily function. A semantical difference, but a
key one.
> And though web-based discussion forums are getting better, too many are
> unwieldy, poorly organized, or have uncontrolled content.
Same can be said for many mailing lists, of course. Wtih missing list
admins or admins who don't believe in policing content -- it's not the
technology, but the implementation and how it's cared for.
> But both mailing lists and USENET are just isolated aspects of this new
> and still evolving communications medium, and ones which may eventually
> be supplanted by something else.
And that's what I'm working on. "something else".
Someone's gotta, if we want it to happen some day.
--
Chuq Von Rospach (Hockey fan? <http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/>)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
<http://www.plaidworks.com/> + <http://www.lists.apple.com/>
