[Noisebridge-discuss] Noisebridge has a (potentially) new communication medium: The Noisebridge ning network!
Seth David Schoen
schoen at loyalty.org
Sun Feb 28 06:53:23 UTC 2010
Ever Falling writes:
> can you elaborate on this a bit?
Well, when you subscribe to a mailing list, you receive the resulting
communications in your existing mail software (which you might have
customized a lot). You could sort or filter it using whatever features
your mail software has, which supposedly could be features that you
like. You can reply to every mailing list in the same way, using the
same interface.
By contrast, using forums requires remembering credentials and URLs
for all of the forums, and using whatever user interface the individual
forums have set up, which might be different from forum to forum.
You also have to type your messages into a web browser (although it's
true that web browsers can let you use a different text editor).
And you have to remember to check on the forums periodically.
I guess a lot of many-to-many communications media from the 1980s
and 1990s assumed that users were happy with, or at least expert
with, their own local message-reading and message-creating
environments, and so that it was appropriate to send messages _to_
the users to deal with however they preferred, rather than asking
the users to come to some other environment in order to participate.
Maybe part of this is a result of the extended flame wars about
text editors and mail clients; since people have a hard time
agreeing about what software is best for these tasks, and since
they also have a level of investment in learning their preferred
environment, a kind of compromise solution is to use something that
works with whatever environment people individually prefer.
Blogs are a challenge to this paradigm, although it seems to me
that RSS was created in response -- to let people at least _read_
blogs in the software of their choice, rather than having to go
to the blogs' different web sites.
--
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> | Qué empresa fácil no pensar en
http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | un tigre, reflexioné.
http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/ | -- Borges, El Zahir
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