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>>I think a usenet newsgroup for Parkinsons would be a welcome idea. >>alt.med.parkinsons would be a good name. Would someone like to >>write an attractive proposal for a newgroup and post it to alt.config? >>-- >>[log in to unmask] >> >News groups have the advantage of being organized in threads. But that's >the only advantage that I know of. To me, the news groups would be another >place to look for pretty much the same data that are in this listserv, and >perhaps another place to post them. This would be an annoyance. It would >also seem to be hard to archive, as the news group items are purged regularly. Newsgroups are really good for large discussions; there aren't many mailing lists with many thousands of people, but there are lots of newsgroups with (estimated) 10's of thousands of reasons. Newsgroups scale up well because proper (threaded) newsreaders make it easy to handle lots of articles, and also the distribution mechanism is much more efficient. You don't need to rely on some kind soul to host a newsgroup (like we rely on the University of Toronto to host this mailing list) Newsgroups are also easier for people to "find", most sites have lists of all the newsgroups they carry and quite often people skim down them to find topics of interest. Its often harder to find mailing lists. The biggest disadvantage with newsgroups is ease of access: - new users have to master another program. Mailing lists just use your normal mail reader, but you have to tackle a "newsreader" to read news (although Netscape does both which helps). - often companies will allow their employees more or less unrestricted email access to the Internet, but often restrict the newsgroups they carry to "business related", or maybe just "serious" groups (i.e. no alt.* groups) - most newsreaders need you to be on line all the time when reading news, which is a pain if you are dialing in from home. There is an excellent off line newsreader for the Mac though, don't know about the PC. You can setup a gateway between a newsgroup and a mailing list; so you could pick which medium you wanted. I don't know much about these gateways and don't know how well it would work - although I can look into it if there is sufficient interest. Setting up a web archive of a newsgroup is pretty easy. Sooner or later, as we grow and become more successful, we will have to start a newsgroup - mailing lists just don't scale. Its just a question when. Suggest we bounce the issue around a little bit more and then hold a vote to see who would use a newsgroupm what it should be called, etc? I can setup a vote quite easily. Simon --------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ---------- Simon J. Coles Email: [log in to unmask] New Information Paradigms Work Phone: +44 1344 778783 http://www.nipltd.com/ Work Fax: +44 1344 772510 =============== Life is too precious to take seriously ===============