Re: [LAU] new! linuxmusicians.com

Dang reply-to-all....

Sorry about the double post you will be getting Dirk-

Re: Christian's Einfeldt Post-

   It a very good post about the politics and the changing ground
surrounding the open source movement, on occasion. My personal belief is
that a seperate, but helping, movement is best, much in the way that
development on open source libraries by different people helps multiple
projects, I am a believer that the same can be applied to getting
information disseminated. That is why earlier I had mentioned wanting to
see tie ins to individual project forums hosted on their own site. It
prevents a duplication of the same questions on multiple different sites by
allowing the one material to be seen by many.

Re: Google's representation of mailing lists and forums searches-

  Ok what happens when I type in something that has been answered on, even
this mailing list, into Google? I get one maybe two replies back on a
search page to be honest, unless I am specifying this list in particular
where I think in that case I get more. I get a link that says, show similar
pages. In all honesty, I don't think I am alone in that if the summary of
those two replies, or even the posts themselves more often than not, don't
show information useful to what I am looking for, I keep looking through
google search results.

  To be honest more often than not, if I am googling something, I get more
useful information from forums and to some extent wikis in Google's search
results. Sure they may be great places to post up pictures of cats and
cheesburgers, but they are also still decent places to get assistance as can
be proven by Ubuntu Forums for example. I moderate one site that has a
section on LInux in general(As well as their A/V editing sections and Apple
sections). I post on another site that is specific to audio and has a linux
section. I know others here do as well because I run into some of them on
those sites. In both of those forums I have helped personally, lots of
people get started in Linux, and have seen many more. They can certainly be
used for troubleshooting and many people would prefer that than dealing with
mailing lists, and especially mailing lists where their email is made public
on most every post they make for mining algorithms to send tons of spam. I
get several hundred spam messages a day to this email that I use for public
postings right now, I can certianly understand that feeling. I also have
decent filtering via gmail, and had Thunderbird doing it before that. I
can't guarantee everyone does that. So yes I think there is something to be
said still for forums in the troubleshooting process.

  In as far as needing to sign up to search, that is something that depends
on the site. Even so, so long as the site is publicly viewable, Google(And
other search engines) will likely still index it, and thus it will turn up
in search results there. When people are looking for a specific answer to a
question, chances are they are going to google first, and thus get
introduced to the forum like that. Also often times i have seen several
people that after finding repeated answers in one spot, then join the forum
to ask a question they couldn't find an answer to. Again I suggest joining
a mailing list to them and they don't respond to favorably to it. To each
their own, choice is at least as much a strength as it is a weakness in the
open source world.

        Seablade

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Received on Mon Apr 14 16:15:03 2008