Mailing Lists are Zombies
ConversationBoard (the code behind ILX) would be perfect for this, I’m thinking. It surprises me how much tech discussion is locked away in little ghettoes like IRC, mailing lists and wikis.As far as I’m concerned, Google Groups is dead.
As far as I’m concerned, mailing lists are
deadzombies.A pain to subscribe to. A pain to manage (you almost immediately need to set up reader-side filtering for any list of any significant traffic). A pain to follow (by date or by thread are both painful). Inefficient. A pain to unsubscribe from.
I used to run a few Mailman lists myself, but gave up since it wasn’t worth the hassle.
Forums as we know them aren’t the answer. I think we need a new kind of forum (unfortunately phpBB has ravaged the world). Stackoverflow is a promising re-think on the topic. Perhaps Google Wave or something like it is the future.
I was hoping blogging would be it. Perhaps it’s too soon to tell, but it doesn’t feel like it. I think it’s still too hard to blog and have real, trackable conversations that way.
Personally, I’d like to see something that would allow quick, off-the-cuff twitter conversations to seamlessly grow into real, persistent, searchable topic-oriented chats.
I don’t read Scoble, but Jeff Atwood just tweeted this related post. I feel dirty linking to Scoble, but I think it’s a good post.
