Russ,
Friday, February 21, 2003, 1:57:44 PM, you wrote:
RA> I personally am very strongly in favor of the unification of messaging
RA> formats,
Email "versus" Netnews debates have existed since the mid-70s. (I count
the early spate of textual, messaging-oriented collaborations systems
that came out of the gas crisis of the early 70s as roughly equivalent
to netnews.)
I believe the basic problem with the debates has been a focus on
mechanism rather than human communication. As soon as we focus on the
human functions, we can identify only a few, salient differences, I
believe.
To me, the only user-level difference that is major is one of
addressing, between explicitly sending to one or more individuals,
versus explicitly sending to a "group". In this regard, I believe that
that netnews is essentially the same as an email list.
Yes, one subscribes to a list but not to a newsgroup. However think
about the mode of posting to an open mailing list that you are not
subscribed to, and using the mailing list archive as the basis for
reading contributions. It is darn close to the style of a newsgroup.
Imagine that Internet mail had a construct for labeling a mailing list.
(One might even hypothesize an additional addressing header, such as
"Follow-up" or... "Newsgroup", or more email-list styled as "List-To" or
the like.)
The infrastructure difference that is massive is, of course, the
relaying technology. Netnews uses a flooding algorithm and mail is
multicast. I have a suspicion there is some sort of opportunity for
convergence, there, but have not tried to think of how.
d/
--
Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
t +1.408.246.8253; f +1.866-358-5301