[Chris Barnes]
> It's my gut feeling that more and more Listserv lists will be mirrored by
> Usenet groups.
I'm going totally off the thread here ... I sure hope you're wrong, Chris.
The difference in s/n ratios between USENET and mailing lists amazes me.
One big reason, of course, is that newsreaders offer every newsgroup to
every schmuck in the world ("press y to subscribe"), whereas joining a
mailing list requires a little more up-front commitment. Another is that
MLM's usually send some sort of welcome message to the user, describing the
purpose of the list & appropriate behavior -- sort of a just-in-time FAQ.
USENET groups feel to me like organized graffiti -- people come off the
street onto some alley with an interesting name, read the posters and
scribblings they find there, then post or scribble their own thoughts
(which will eventually be cleaned off by the expiration system). Mailing
lists, at their best, feel like a poster session (invitations by word of
mouth), with the posters saved and indexed by efficient archive-software
librarians. USENET guarantees, by its structure, a lower average level of
commitment by readers/posters, a higher level of noise, a higher level of
frustration, a lower level of organizational memory. In exchange for all
that it offers a few advantages in terms of disk space and bandwidth
requirements, but I'm not really even convinced of those, except perhaps
for the very, very popular newsgroups.
My best example right now: comp.mail.list-admin.software, which I was
hoping would be such a nice newsgroup (no, I'm not being sarcastic). What
a loss. Filled with "can MLM X do Y" messages to which the only answer is
RTFM :-), and with messages that have no relation at all to list management
software, c.m.l.s is actually a net loss to the community because it
diffuses the focus we had in MLM-specific mailing lists like this one, the
Majordomo lists, the ListProc list, etc.
Norm
--
"And now, the Superstore - unequaled in size, unmatched in variety,
unrivaled inconvenience."
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