Re: eBook Community's Twelfth Anniversary: State of The Group Message

Brad Ensten wrote:

> Personally, I find the email discussion group format
> to be less than optimal for community building and 
> discussions.  I am a member of several email groups
> but  I mainly only lurk on them.  I greatly prefer a
> web based forum.

Can you point to one or more web forums you believe are successful in
community building and encouraging discussion? There are a number of
web forum architectures out there, and clearly how they are designed
have a major influence on usability and encouraging participation.

There are a number of them that, pardon the expression, suck royally.
(Makes me think that geeks are the last folks who should be designing
these online forums! <smile/>)

YahooGroups itself is sort of a hybrid in that a web interface is
applied on top of the traditional "listserv".

Btw, some here may prefer receiving notice of new messages to TeBC by
RSS. This allows one to turn off receiving messages by email yet get a
notice of new messages. With the online interface, one can read the
new messages as well as post to the forum.


> All communities need steady infusion of new,
> participating members in order to thrive.  I'm not
> sure this community, as it stands, is attracting
> enough new participants.  I think a web based forum
> with posts being spidered by search engines and
> therefore findable by by searchers will attract more
> new participants.

One thing I do for this group and the sister "Digital Text Community"
is to forward a copy of each message to a Google Groups archive
mirror. This allows the messages to be found via Google -- maybe not
at the "top of the heap", but at least they are part of the Google
"corpus." The URL to the Google mirror is:

   http://groups.google.com/group/ebook-community-archive/

To see if the messages searchable by Google's "web" seach service, I
dug up a two month message, and searched on a random sentence in the
message. The message was found by the Google web search. (It's also
findable by Googles "group" search, too.)


> With that said I do think the voices I read here,
> ebook authors, editors and publishers plus some ebook
> enthusiasts are very interesting and is a core that
> should be built upon and expanded.

Well, this has been the primary focus of this group for the last 12
years, so yes that is a core that will continue to be built upon and
hopefully expanded.


One model that is interesting to try is if there is another web
interface (similar to YahooGroups web interface) that is an overlay to
the traditional "listserv", but maybe better than YahooGroups. We can
port our messages there and those who wish to use that online
interface rather than YahooGroups, could do so. So I could see a
number of ways to access this group (e.g., traditional email, RSS,
online forum, etc.)

Ideas? Anyone wanting to experiment with alternate interfaces to TeBC,
let me know.

Jon Noring
TeBC Administrator





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