On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Mark Cunningham wrote:

I don't see why spam has entered the equation here at all.

My bad, I mentioned it in passing.

Are you saying that the mailing list will introduce spam to people's blogs and that's why we shouldn't do it?

It's a consideration, from a technical standpoint: because spammers are looking for exploits, and so when putting the thing together you have to consider how a spammer might game the system.

on one or two topics. (Last year's exchanges about the death of fudge are prime example... that whole discussion occured *because* I blogged about it rather than posted in a forum)

Well, kind of. There *was* the business about the planetary redirect. ("FOUR USERS!")

I always viewed blogs as being a sort of "distributed" forum. The Vanilla forum software comes to mind because it feels more like a community blogging than forum. I've turned a blogging software into a full realised forum, because the technology is the same. Call it what you will, a forum post or a blog post... at the end of the day, it's content that can make up a part of a conversation. And once it's on the internet, you don't really have control over where it will go.

Yep. You have a thread starter, and you have a reply/comment. A blog is just restrictions on who can start threads, and a particular display template, is all. From a technical standpoint, anyway. Socially, that's something else - hosting and control has a big impact, which is part of why I'm considering it.

In a sense, what Karen is suggesting, is sort of already happening. The Fudge planet feed, people use it to see what people are talking about and then if they see something they find interesting, they'll comment on that blog. The difference here is the conversation occurs on the mailing list rather than on other people's blogs where it might not be seen by the rest of the members.

The notion kind of grew out of trying to figure out how to make the Fudge Firehose ("Planet Fudge" is dead, long live the Fudge Firehose) more useful to the Fudge List.

And how to revive GAMERS, too... (hello? Anyone out there actually roleplaying these days?)

I do think though you need to get a good sense if people want it or not though, just turning it on in an existing mailing list where only two people want it and one doesn't, may not work.

I turned it on in the dev site, and I actually could turn it on and no one would *notice*... so I'm using my LJ as a posting client, who's to know? (Other than the people who have me friended over there, anyway.) Come to that, you could probably do something bizarro with Feedburner or another feed-to-mail thing, and manage to post to mailing lists with a blog without the mailing list having to do anything special. But I digress.

I'm also assuming, of course, that only the blog authors are responsible for directing their stuff into GAMERS, which is pretty much how it needs to be ("claiming" blogs is a solved problem). I don't foresee anything good of coming from directing the Fudge Firehose into the Fudge List, for instance.