While there is no doubt that you can find them on a search engine or through searching, you have to have the right term. I recently tried to find a resolution about 'dog aggression' in a Yahoo group that one of the discdog organizations uses for rules development. Searching for 'dog aggression' left off all the posts dealing with 'aggressive dogs', which would still happen on a forum, the only difference is that the topics are threaded and usually has an organizational structure, which means it's easier to find what you are looking for.
Surfing 15000 posts is not very practical. It's painful, which is why not many people do it. People come in fresh and instead of searching the archives, or after their search terms failed, they then ask a question that was answered 3 months, or a year ago. Which often incites the same hostilities that ended the thread in the past. Picking scabs and all... On the side, when I search for things in Yahoo groups when my keywords don't work, I usually try to recall the date then start surfing from there. I think that Forums are far better situated to reflect permanence than these groups, but that's just my opinion. Also, I think that there are some very different human behaviors on display in these groups vs a forum. Cheers, Ron Watson http://k9disc.blip.tv http://k9disc.com http://pawsitivevybe.com/vlog http://pawsitivevybe.com On Nov 14, 2007, at 2:16 PM, Brian Richardson - WhatTheCast? wrote: > On Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:29 pm, Ron Watson wrote: > > The thing is that these distribution lists, pretending to be groups, > > are flashes in the pan - there's no permanence. So I can write > > something nasty and it's gone - poof - it's the definition of FLash > > in the pan. > > Well, I can find these discussions on web archives of the list. I can > even find them searching Google. > > Putting the content on a board or list or widget-of-the-week doesn't > change human behavior ... it just changes the delivery system. > -- > Brian Richardson > - http://whatthecast.com > - http://siliconchef.com > - http://dragoncontv.com > - http://www.3chip.com > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
