From: Randal Whittle (rwhittle_at_usa.net)
Date: Tue Dec 01 1998 - 13:12:38 EST
At 11:14 PM 11/30/98 -0500, you wrote:
>> I don't like web-based, but it does potentially reach more people for the
>> simple fact that most anyone with an internet connection knows about & uses
>> a web browser, but far too few people have a clue what a newsgroup
reader is.
>
>News has the huge advantage of being specifically designed for
>large-scale discussions with huge numbers of participants.
>Even if there were no speed difference, I would prefer to see
>web-based boards and mailing lists transferred over to news
>servers, where I have options like threading (as opposed to
>the FIFO format of web boards and mail), killfiling topics
>(and annoying posters), and preselecting everything I want to
>read so I don't have to do anything but hit the space bar for
>the next hour. :-) A newsreaders is built into Netscape, and
>it's trivial to link to a newsgroup via an HTML tag, so I
>don't think it should be an issue that most people don't know
>what it is.
John, you overestimate the abilities of your internet-using (newly so)
peers. To you and I, and perhaps most anyone on this list, it is indeed
trivial. But to a host of people who have hooked on to the internet in the
past year or two, it is not. These people know how to use a web browser
and their e-mail software--and nothing else.
I just spent the Thanksgiving Holiday helping my in-laws figure out their
e-mail. They had recently gotten hooked up to an ISP (Finally! My wife
was happy she could finally exchange e-mail with them), sent out a couple
of messages...and then disappeared. Neither my wife's or anyone else's
e-mail was being responded to.
I came to find out that they weren't dialing up! They would just open
their e-mail software and expect new messages to be there.
At any rate, you just have to understand that this is the kind of people
we are dealing with--people who let the "12:00" flash on their VCR's
because they don't know how to set the time.
When you're marketing a product to the masses--and arguably, the ThinkPads
are--you have to accomodate those kind of facts. Hence, the Web-based
discussion areas. I agree that if they were smart, they'd complement it
with the newsgroup-style thing, but I'm not in charge over there. :-)
>Unfortunately, news has the HUGE disadvantage of having been
>taken over by the spammers. I've given up posting to
>newsgroups so as to avoid the deluge of spam from all the
>harvesters. And I've given up reading a lot of my favorite
>groups because they've been innundated by spam ads.
>Personally, I think spammers should be shot for destroying
>what had been a shining example of a cooperative distributed
>networked service.
I share your sentiments. There *are* ways around it though. I know of
one "private" newsgroup that one of the Prof's in my Electronic Commerce
program when I was at USC was invited to join. It was essentially a
newsgroup, but required a password for access. It made use of Netscape's
"Collabra" software, a part of its "Communicator" suite (which included
Navigator 4.0). This is a fabulous solution, as it allows you to limit
access to people who want to be part of the discussion and lock out spammers.
But again, it necessarily limits your pool of legitimate users too, for
the same reason I stated above. Everyone has a browser & e-mail, few
people know what else they can do on the internet.
Twenty years ago, Americans voted for a moral presidency. Why did it fail?
Carter held out hope that God's love and Jesus' teachings mean something to
a hurting world. He did not fail us; we failed him. We say we want a moral
presidency, but we elect presidents who maintain our illusions of comfort
and self-righteousness -- not ones who preach and do justice. The central
problem of religion and politics is our own selfishness.
Twenty years later, we have the president we deserve...
Diana Butler, dist. by NYT Special Features
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