[Sigia-l] IBM Reinvents E-mail

[Tom Chi]

I find threads pretty hard to parse, whether they be in email or an
online forum, etc.

In the online forum world, we have tried to solve the problem via
moderation, but moderation is one of those things which takes a bunch of
time and gives you little in return.  Actually, let me qualify that a
bit more.  If you are the sort of person who likes to spend time in the
meta task of evaluating the quality of other people's comments, *and*
you have enough insight and experience to do this well, then moderation
is for you.  

The problem is that for most people, these two things are not true.
Thus, on Slashdot you'll have threads about physics which are modded up
even when they are factually wrong, and you'll still generally have a
lot of cruft.

So if not threads, then what?

Really, I don't know the answer.  Since this is an IA board, I'm sure we
all have opinions on how data can be sensibly organized, but when that
data comes from so many sources and in such an unstructured way, the
problem space quickly grows out of control.

We can explore approaches which limit either the sources which can
contribute to the discussion, or approaches where the sources are forced
to tag their contributions with metadata.  Perhaps we can look at ways
to mine semantic intent out of threads and apply metadata post-facto.
Or maybe a super-efficient revision to the moderation approach, which
allows qualified moderators to structure content more powerfully than
post by post.

Hm...



-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Listera
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 4:36 PM
To: SIGIA-L
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] IBM Reinvents E-mail

"Tom Chi" wrote:

> A bigger question is whether threads are an artifact of email being
> "misused" or whether they are the correct model for asynchronous
> communication.

Well, don't hold back. :-) Where are you going with this?

----
Ziya

Design is how it works.

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