One conversation on a thread? Which can always be referred to? I think people are becoming less and less clueful in regards to hijacking threads, and my experience with email archives is that even the best are hard to navigate and almost impossible to reliably link to specific messages over time. More importantly, the people who are participating in the discussion aren’t actively maintaining the links.

I have written thousands of email messages on web architecture, but if you search for them what you will find is the hundreds of comments on my email messages (not the messages themselves). I have no idea why. The digital world needs librarians too.

The primary difference seems to be the nature of archives and how they are linked. The pretty links of a blog (configured correctly) are referenced more consistently than the cross-references within email archives. As a result, the PageRank style of evaluating the quality of resources comes into play and I find it far easier to search for relevant blog entries than relevant email messages.

In any case, it is a rare day when I can have a coherent discussion with my peers on an email list (outside of the product-specific dev lists at Apache). This blog isn’t really for coherent discussion — it is for regurgitated conclusions. The discussion happens in the ripples.

….Roy

I was reading your first entry “I need to start organizing my own correspondence” after reading Stu’s and making a comment.

So i’ll ask the same thing of you as I’ve just asked Stu. Is there any reason you wouldn’t share a forum with your peers? I’m going nuts watching everyone broadcast from the comfort of their own blog, and never seeing the threads tangle, or conversations happen. Just your blog roll makes my eyes spin.

I understand the email deluge, which is everyone’s problem. But one conversation on a thread, above the radar, which can always be referred to, makes more sense to my universe than using email. And if everyone has a blog, which is the fashion now, we’re just substituting one deluge problem for another.

I love a puzzle to, but I won’t play the blog game because the deluge effect is so obviously coming, and I won’t try and finish a puzzle i know i can’t solve by myself.