[H-GEN] software runs the world
Greg Black
gjb at gbch.net
Sat Mar 19 01:05:31 EST 2005
On 2005-03-18, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 09:12:26PM -0500, Robert Brockway wrote:
>> On Fri, 19 Mar 2005, Russell Stuart wrote:
>>> BTW, it is my imagination, or is there a general movement
>>> away from mailing lists such as this to blogs and rss feeds
>>> as the vehicle for on-line discussion?
>
> I think it's true, and in general I think it's pretty rotten. Blogs
> tend to make it very difficult to tell if someone has replied to your
> reply; the general solution seems to be to sleep with one eye open,
> watching your referrer logs, or to use blogging software the sends email
> alerts when a comment is made.
One of the problems with mailing lists is shown by this very
thread which has now appeared on three different Humbug lists.
That shows that (1) we have too many lists; or (2) that nobody
knows what the lists are intended for. Since there's no
consensus about where this belongs, I'm going to leave it on the
list where the previous item in the thread appeared.
My take on the use of lists versus newsgroups versus blogs is a
bit different. I think Usenet has had its day (and I stopped
using it in 1995). I think lists still work and are excellent
for discussions. For me a blog is a place where I get to rant
about anything that takes my fancy, regardless of its relevance
to anybody else, whereas on a list I limit myself to "on-topic"
matter and usually to responses to requests from other members
of the list.
When I post to a list, people get to reply to me, to argue the
point with me, to show me the error of my ways, etc. On my
blog, nobody gets to comment directly. I like it that way and
have no plans to allow comments. When people wish to comment,
they either email me (if they don't know me and care about me
seeing their comment) or they comment in their own blog (which I
may or may not read, and probably will never hear about if I
don't already know them).
I have commented previously on one of the Humbug lists that I
don't think it's kosher to respond to a list message with an
item in a blog -- if the discussion began as a discussion on a
list, that's really where it belongs.
> I don't think I have ever seen a deeply nested discussion on a blog.
I have, and some of them have been very good, although this is
only true of one blog that I follow with any real interest.
However, although the discussions are very interesting, the blog
software sucks rocks and makes the mental effort of threading
the discussions *very* difficult. So, although it's possible,
it's more difficult than it should be if it's to be a success.
>> The lists I'm on (30 mostly technical lists, give or take) are still very
>> busy. Blogs would be more like news groups in application I think.
>
> Not as much as you'd think. What I do see is a very large number of
> PHP-driven forums which reimplement USENET, and poorly; there's no
> redistribution of content, no killfile mechanism, and it's impossible to
> crosspost, so on and so forth.
>
> It seems to me that web-based discussion forums have removed most of the
> advantages of mailing lists and USENET without offering anything of true
> value for the kinds of discussions that many people want to have.
I belong to several organisations which have web forums and
whose members are constantly begging me to participate in this
new form of self-abuse. One club I'm a member of has asked me
to setup such a thing for them to replace the perfectly good
mailing lists I run for them. I'm not interested. All web
forums suck for two reasons: the software sucks completely and
makes them really painful to use; and the people who are willing
to use this crap are so stupid that there's no content anyway.
There are probably a few exceptions to that, but they're so rare
that they just don;t count.
One last remark about blogs versus lists, at least when it's a
blog like mine -- I write different stuff to a list, because I
know it will get pushed down the throats of all the subscribers
and so I need to be a bit restrained in both content and style.
The people who read my blog choose to read my writings, rather
than to be connected to a discussion group; so it's fair enough
for me to write as much or as little as I like about anything
that takes my fancy. People who get bored with my opinions can
stop reading my blog without missing out on anything else at
all. But they can't escape from what I send to a list without
also losing the other valuable material the list might have
offered them. In other words, list etiquette is much more
exacting than blog etiquette.
Cheers, Greg
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