Re: so what of it, hombres?

[Peter Hollings <phollings@xxxxxxx>]

Ravi --

Let me explain a little bit about my suggestion.  In the nascient field
of social software, P2P communities, etc., there is a concept of "push"
vs. "pull" technologies. A website is pull in the sense that
participants have to make a conscious choice and take a little bit of
trouble to go there and don't even learn till they get there if there is
something of interest.  A website has to pull participants in. Email is
push in the sense that content is pushed on participants who can just
scan subject lines to determine if they are interested. Have you ever
visited a website and said to yourself "Gee that's interesting!,"
bookmarked the site but found that there was no mailing list so that you
put yourself on it and thereby keep in touch?  Push and pull are
complimentary.

PEN-L is currently a listserv and "push".  But there are some functions
that lists don't do very well.  Yes, there is an archive, but it is,
like most listserv archives, sorta clunky. Moreover, there are lots of
things you can do on a website that complement a listserv: post links to
related sites, display a newsfeed, allow better administration of user
accounts, have a documents library, members' bios, etc. I am just
inventing stuff here to see if I can fire up some imagination. The point
is, however, that you can do lots of things on a website that a list
doesn't support -- if the PEN-L community sees value in this.

Let me frame this a little differently. PEN-L is a community.
Communities on the Internet have been supported by various technologies
which are evolving. Two key technologies are listservs and webboards,
which are, respectively, push and pull, email and website. Today, these
technologies are merging into software products that provide both
functions which I think makes a lot of sense because what you can do on
a website complements and strengthens what you can do by email alone. My
term for these systems is "electronic forums". They serve communities
with common interests with threaded topics and are accessable via both
email and a website.

So, I think the key question is what features people would want. A wiki
is great if one wants to jointly author something like a book (I am
thinking of wikipedia as an example). A blog I think of as being like an
electronic magazine. It can be authored by one or more, but I think in
the latter case some sort of discipline is required if it is to have
integrity as a publication. If I were to look at what PEN-L is today and
what category of social software comes closest to matching and extending
it's current activities, I would guess that that would be a forum
because the essence of a forum is discussion, with publication
secondary.

Peter Hollings

-----Original Message-----
From: PEN-L list [mailto:PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of ravi
Sent: Friday, September 23, 2005 3:01 PM
To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] so what of it, hombres?


Just the other day (23/9/05 3:44 pm), Peter Hollings opined:
>
> Also, why not have the posts to the list appear as discussion threads
on
> the website?
>
> This way, we have the advantages of a site, permanence, as well as
> email, interactivity.
>

Its possibly do-able, though I may have to do some hacking to get it to
work. The problem though is I may hit space constraints as the contents
grow. But more importantly, a question: do you want the discussion
threads to be interactive i.e., you want users to be able to post
responses on the web site? If so, I am not sure that's good, because it
basically splits PEN-L into two separate forums, which may not be
entirely in sync with each other.

        --ravi

--
If you wish to contact me, you will get my attention faster by
substituting "r" for "listmail" in my email address. Thank you!