Seriously, different cultures are just different. William's
idea to compare Usenet with "chat" is nonsense, even RfC 1855
got _that_ right: Mailing lists and Usenet in chapter 3, IRC
among others in chapter 4, and one-to-one e-mail in chapter 2.
If you reread my post you'll see that I implied more general meaning
by "chat" and that would encompass mail lists and usenet. I'm of the
opinion that organization of purely mail list discussion is very
different then when you're expecting the discussion to produce reference
documents and to do number of other things related to implementation of
what is being discussed.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net