Re: Other lists

Kathy Guest nicely summarized email discussion groups for daylilies and
hostas. (I just joined the hosta robin and was delighted to see Kathy there,
and was relieved that she didn't change screen names and call herself
"The Slug".  ;)  )

I'd like to clarify one statement in her posting, however:

:if you DO join the daylily e-mail robin (yes... that IS
:the correct term for our group for all you A-type personality folk),

I think a discussion group that uses a listserver should be called a
mailing list. This is standard internet terminology, and using it is the
best way to avoid confusion about what the list is and how it works.
It's not a question of personality types (at least I hope not!), but
of using a standard vocabulary so that we can communicate without
misunderstanding.

"Robin" of course is a word that comes from round robins conducted by
US mail. I suppose the word could apply to a variety of different
arrangements for discussing things on line, but I think it would be
_extremely_ helpful to reserve it for discussion groups that do not
already have a standard term to describe them (mailing lists and newsgroups).

I would suggest that "robin" is best used to refer to an arrangement
that is similar to US mail robins, where each member has a "route list"
of other members' names and addresses, everyone is expected to participate,
and the whole thing is directed from a central point.

This is very different from a mailing list run by a listserver program.

With the daylily list it may be a moot point. But in the cyber-iris world,
we have both a mailing list and email robins. It will not help matters
to muddle the language to the degree that no one knows which of the two
we're talking about.


===============================================================

Tom Tadfor Little         tlittle@lanl.gov  -or-  telp@Rt66.com
technical writer/editor   Los Alamos National Laboratory
---------------------------------------------------------------
Telperion Productions     http://www.rt66.com/~telp/
===============================================================
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index