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

About the Mail Pages

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:11/10/1998; 6:00:14 AM
Topic:First message
Msg #:283 (In response to 282)
Prev/Next:282 / 284

Over the last few weeks I've gotten quite a bit of mail asking when the Mail Pages are coming back. The answer is I don't know, and I don't know if they're ever coming back.

They're a lot of work for me, more than you probably imagine. I read every single word, and do a light edit on each item in the Mail apges. Some people don't bother punctuating or even using Upper Case Characters to begin sentences or paragraphs.

Also, because I filtered out the noise, the bullshit messages from people who try to stop discussions to avoid subjects that they're scared of (my conclusion of course), there was a lot of stress for me in editing these pages. I'd have to read about people's personal issues, and I found this pretty invasive and unpleasant.

I want to try some new models for collaborative discussion. I'm getting ready to do some more work on the discussion group software. We're at an interesting place. With more XML tools showing up, and more communication-aware editors, that go beyond emailers, and more and more people have websites, and we have a great search engine here. All this stuff is coming together, here and elsewhere. I see email that depends on a human editor as a tired thing. Been there done that, I know what it's like, I want to try out some new things.

What should you do? If you were a contributor via the Mail Pages, give the discussion group a try. Write me an email, but before you send it, come here to the Discussion Group and paste it into a message.

Please try to be self-editing. Read your words. If your message is basically to tell people not to discuss something, don't bother posting it, because I will delete it.

Do your own editing. Your ideas will have much more impact if you take care to punctuate reasonably, and if you're not a good speller, do your writing in a writing tool with a good spell checker before posting it. What was valuable about the Mail Pages was the quality of the writing. Some of that was my doing, now I'd like to distribute that work to the writers.

Let's give this a try, OK?

Dave

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