Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Dale Dougherty's article: Off Topic

Author:Steve Yost
Posted:11/3/1999; 2:20:34 PM
Topic:Dale Dougherty's article: Off Topic
Msg #:12668
Prev/Next:12667 / 12669

I responded to Dale's article at http://weblogs.userland.com/oreilly/ via email, and he encouraged me to post here. Here's basically what I wrote:

You've hit the nail on the head in your final statements. You've also intuited the history of the name: I originally came to the idea when I was on an announcement-only mailing list and wanted to discuss a potentially hot topic; in fact the example at http://www.takeitoffline.com/example.html is the true story of my inspiration for TIO. You're right that in the more general context the name may be misleading. I've reserved a couple of domain names, one of which I may ultimately use instead.

Also, when you say "Steve's service, in effect, is archiving the topic for future reference by participants and non-participants alike" you anticipate one of the next features I want to add (originally suggested by Chris Locke, and reinforced by a statement in Jon Udell's book): letting the creator of the topic do a final edit, removing and editing messages as desired, before presenting the thread in a final format (sorted recent-last), suitable for saving locally and indexing by your local search engine. This supports the need to archive a productive discussion for use in "knowledge-management" applications.

Another item high on my to-do list is a more secure option with password protection (probably one password for the entire discussion).

-Steve Yost

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:20 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.