From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu May 30 2002 - 13:23:13 MDT
On Thu, 30 May 2002, jeff davis wrote:
> Ditto yup. I made a similar comment a while back and
> someone responded that there was a list software-related
> technical reason for staying with the same thread "title".
I believe the infamous "someone" may have been me and it
was due to the fact that the Javien linking code can only
link messages and present a topic response "map" based
on subject headers (or deeper code in the message headers
regarding "In-Response-To: perhaps).
So if you are offlist and expect to have any hope of following
(and engaging in) a discussion, the Subject lines have to
remain the same. Likewise with the "Lucifer" archives that
sorted by subject.
> I didn't get it then, and I still don't.
That's not my problem... :-)
The volume on the list is very difficult to deal with (and
pursue other productive activities at the same time). Unless
you have a *very* sophisticated sorting capability (e.g.
(a) topics in which you have engaged in the conversation;
(b) messages that mention your name (so you can respond to responses);
(c) topics containing keywords of high interest to you;
(d) messages by individuals whose posts are generally informative;
(e) messages that are spin-offs of topics of interest to you;
etc.
The Kartoo meta-search "mapping" facility I pointed out recently,
might go a long way to solving the problem (if applied to the
ExI list traffic) because you could visualize the discussion
vectors and persue them until they become uninteresting to oneself.
But until that becomes available perhaps the best thing would be
to develop a metric for how much one should think about the
"Subject" line relative to how much time you spent responding
to a message. If you spend 15 minutes typing a response to a
message, should you spend 10% of that time (1.5 minutes) weighing
whether or not to change the subject line -- balancing the fact
that changing it may lose participants in the conversation (due
to the software constraints I've pointed out above) with the
fact that a more accurate subject line for discussion vectors
may attract new participants.
My 2 cents.
Robert
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