Re: economic efficiency of free software

[email protected] wrote:
> A colloquium I recently attended used the paper "Stuff I've Seen" for the 
> topic.  Of course, one has to think outside the M$-centric box that is 
> framed by that paper but doing so and taking that idea as an accomplished 
> tech... OK, what does the system look like now?  What are the implications?
> Stuff I've seen implies a personal history.  This in turn implies a system 
> that adapts to the user.  When we get to this place then a forum format 
> may become obvious.

It's been an obvious feature ever since the first forum was created.
Indeed even when we just used mail and usenet news, it would have been
useful.

The tough problem appears to be how do you integrate that with all the
different tools people like to use for different information sources.
For mail and news, for example, GNUS can integrate those, but I found
that while GNUS was a nice newsreader, it wasn't my preference for
email.  So emails I wanted to keep and news I wanted to keep were kept
separate, and eventually when I stopped reading news my archive of
collected articles fell into disuse, because it was only accessible
through the tool I didn't use any more.

Now that we have a gazillion web forums, all different, it is even
tougher to track things like that.

-- Jamie