Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 19:36:01 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: jcwells@nwlink.com (Jason C. Wells) Cc: fran@reyes.somos.net (Francisco Reyes), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: egroups now Yahoo groups ??? cool Message-ID: <200102021936.MAA12023@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.96.1010201223831.8042A-100000@utah> from "Jason C. Wells" at Feb 01, 2001 10:57:11 PM
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> The domain makes the brand. It is such a vacuous distinction. I disagree. Despite the work of DNSINT, I think that exposed domain names may in fact go away at some point. The value of a domain name today is pretty much non-existant, as far as Internet space goes, since if you come in to a default portal page, you just search for what you want, and then click out to it via a link. Alternately, you use your "favorites" or "bookmarks", and click out that way. There isn't really any domain name typing involved, unless you pack-rat things to the point of being unable to find the ones you want easily. I would be really interested in statistics on browsers, to know what percentage have the "show location" region enabled vs. disabled, but of course the browser morons aren't really thinking of useful information like that, and would prefer to instrument things that let them know your surfing patterns, since their interest is in pushing advertising to you, not improving the medium. There is a nice example of this: the IETF working group DNSINT was founded to allow the use of native languages in host names; the true reasons for wanting this are to support non-linkable objects in print, radio, television, and business card based advertising. The actual effect of this, particularly given the unvarnished hatred the Japanese have for Unicode (due mostly to it's use of Chinese dictionary order for the CJK unification), will be to balkanize the domain name space into regions which require character-set specific input methods, not available to most people outside a given region. A secondary effect will be to tie DNS namespaces loosely to geopolitical controls; this allows the Chinese, for instance, to put ideological controls into effect on their borders. These are reall all emergent properties, but it makes my point, that the domain/brand duality isn't quite as clear-cut as people think; "common sense" really doesn't get you the right answer. > I wonder what would happen if someone went way retro and handed > out IP numbers. "Welcome to 192.168.23.45, your source for > widgets!" (It would save hostmaster contacts a bunch of spam > for one.) Actually, you can send mail to "hostmaster@[192.168.23.45]", no problem; see RFC 821 and the followon RFC's. The best place to do this is the RFC pages at http://208.184.76.42/ 8-) 8-). > I really prefer the seperation of the different mediums of internet > communication. Lists are cool. News is cool. The web is cool. Mashing > it all together, IMO, results in something that is less than the sum of > the parts. It's called "federation". You should look at the O'Reilly project which federates news outlets. It lets them take XML article descriptions, and provide them out there in a federated list, whic is then displayed as "headlines" or "recent news" or whatever. If you think about it, it's only a matter of time until article rating on user postings are federated along with several standard news outlets to provide an article stream personalized for a user (in fact, non-rated auto-rating criteria engines are likely to be a "next big thing" in this area -- remember that I have prior art on this!). That means that you really don't care if it was email to a list which you subscribe to, a posting to a news group you subscribe to, or the result of an ABC News "in depth" report: as long as it meets your "worth noticing" criteria, you probably want it shown on your "mynewspaper" page. I'll agree that unicast email (email sent directly to you) in all likelihood does not belong in the same place as your "broadcast" mail subscriptions. > I didn't particularly care for egroups. I used them because that is where > the content I desired was disseminated. The real value in these things today really lies solely in the fact that they maintain large archives. As storageless web access devices become more popular (yea! The death of cookies!), the ability to go in and look at "what's going on today", and then traverse back into the archives will be more useful (not to mention access via a mobile device with limited bandwidth, perhaps via SMS, being aided by downloading headers but not bodies -- shades of NNTP and IMAP4 clients, and to a lesser extent, the POP3 "HEAD" command...). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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