[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,
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