Anyone read the third-page sidebar article in the May 1996 BYTE magazine
"What Conferencing Is And Isn't" (pg.78)?
 
I found this article to be comparing apples and cats, especially as it
attempted to distinguish between "conferencing" and "listservers".
 
What I found were distinctions among presentation methods among what
I would consider equally valid "conferencing" activities. In addition,
not only did I find some of the "distinctions" to not be, but I found
other distinctions the article made between (presentation, not
conferencing) methods to be very fuzzy around the edges, by which
I mean that, in the fine spirit of the Unix "tool box" paradigm, many
of the distinctions can be made to easily disappear by using/combining
software tools easily found on the internet.
 
Does anyone here believe that listserved (discussion) lists are not
"conferencing" tools? Are there some kinds of "conferencing"
that (good) listservers can't support (other than truly realtime
interactive interrupt-driven online conversations)?
 
(I hope this isn't considered off-topic for this list. LISTSERV list
owners probably thought they were supporting a form of conferencing,
and might be surprised to learn that their favorite brand of listserver
is "not conferencing".)
Peter