Task 2: Lists

An email list is a way of communicating to a large amount of people in a single email. Members choose to receive emails on certain topics. This form of communication is powerful because participation only involves checking email, and it also allows for personal ways to receive the emails, such as individually, or digest format. It also puts the information in the users face - in a busy world this ability is powerful. The negatives of this form of communication is that active participation is required to stay on top of all the information shared, the large amounts of emails can also be frustrating, and it's possible for your email to quickly fill with unwanted or irrelevant information.

A discussion board is a forum on a website which allows people to discuss common interests through group communication. It is separate from your email, and all the group can read and usually participate in messaging. The benefits of discussion boards is that the discussion board is available when it is convenient, and the forums are usually conveniently archived. The negatives are that a discussion board user can easily fall behind if they don't check the discussion board and that posters to the discussion boards often forget to proofread their work leading to confusion and misinterpretation.

Both these tools are useful in different situations. The discussion boards are helpful when a user is only interested, or a passer-by. It's a less committing way to interact with the community which holds the desired information. It also allows archiving for users, allowing researchers to recover information. Email lists on the other hand are great for users who are active, and desire to always be in the loop with little effort. This is especially helpful for smaller groups.

For this task I signed up to a few email lists. I started by looking at a few public messages on yahoo groups, but decided quite quickly that I would sign up for an account and get the messages sent to my email. I joined BookCrazy as a digest subscriber and A_N_I_M_E_ as an individual email subscriber. I soon noticed that this was a great way of communicating to a large amount of people quickly and easily, without external effort, all that was required was reading my email (which I atleast do every hour or so). One problem I've found is the lack of poofreading of users and that the messages (although I have not had a problem so far) probably can't be moderated easily (but luckily people seem to be fairly sensible and to the topic).