Sorry for the lack of LBC content.
The almost cancerous growth of the Internet is going to bring radical
changes in the way we do things. Usenet and mailing lists will almost
certainly have to change. I just can't see them scaling properly to meet the
crush of new users.
In general, I think you have to switch to a "pull" versus "push" format. Not
everyone is interested in everything, so trying to continue to push ever
increasing amounts of information to a rapidly growing audience is bound to
fail eventually. (Of course, I'm sure that compaies like Sprint don't mind
at the moment. They just keep adding capacity and ringing up the $$$.)
One possibility is to offer a World-Wide Web format. Messages could be
funnelled to an archive somewhere with a pointer page listing subjects
updated automatically, maybe rolling over each day to a new page. (Old pages
would still be available.) You could have your cake and eat it too.
Messages could also feed into an update process for a WAIS database for
retrospective searching.
Today is my last day at GE. I am embarking on a new career looking at all
sorts of uses for the Internet. At some point in the near future I should
have direct access (no firewall) to the Internet which will allow me to
experiment with things like this.
Skip (montanaro@crd.ge.com)
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