From: Karl Anderson (kra@monkey.org)
Date: Tue Oct 17 2000 - 16:55:16 PDT
Adam Rifkin <adam@KnowNow.com> writes:
> There's a fine line between spam and news in some cases, and we're a big
> fan of the phrase that "sufficiently targetted advertising *is*
> content", so Derek and Kragen and Rohit are here at 1:30am and we're
> getting philosophical on why people read FoRK, and whether the answer to
> that question is different from why people *subscribe* to FoRK when you
> could just poll the web page at http://www.xent.com/ from time to time.
I've been taught to revere the crotchety geezers that look down at
me for using a news/mail client - "you can do all that with cat, grep,
and sed".
Why is it, then, that I think that people who say the modern
equivalent? "you can just search www.xent.com"?
Oh, I know why, because it just doesn't sound the same. "you can just
type your search terms in this little text box, and if the engine are
updated and you get results, open each result in a new browser window,
and use your browser's search to find the term *again*".
Seriously, the answer for me is that the chaff is easy to winnow away,
so why deal with the painful interface. If I ever want to really look
at a mailing list archive that's before my time, I download it locally
and sic my mailreader on it - which is really just saying again that
the balkanized web just sucks, why should I have to bother downloading
it to use my tools on it?
What impresses me about the archives is that for lots of the technical
questions that I'm searching the web about at Google, a forkpost turns
up in the first or second page of results.
-- Karl Anderson kra@monkey.org http://www.monkey.org/~kra/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 17 2000 - 16:22:09 PDT