Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale
From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: CALL FOR DISCUSSION:  SCI.VIRTUAL-WORLDS
Message-ID: <256A43C1.520F@rpi.edu>
Date: 22 Nov 89 06:59:13 GMT
References: <14547-repost@well.UUCP> <1989Nov16.161429.12549@talos.uucp>
	<3965@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu> <21166@ut-emx.UUCP> <14666@well.UUCP>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Lines: 33

In <14666@well.UUCP> bluefire@well.UUCP (Bob Jacobson) writes:
Bob> Do people take talk. groups seriously (i.e., would they post to a
Bob> talk group notices of papers prepared, suggest alternative
Bob> research techniques, compare results, etc.)?  Not being familiar
Bob> with talk. groups -- our system does not emphasize their
Bob> availability -- I'm skeptical.

Do people take them seriously?  Sure.  Do other people consider them
the bowels of USENET?  Sure.  Perhaps what talk.* needs is image
enhancement.  A lot of times when someone wants a group and talk is
suggested as the hierarchy they are put off by being relegated to the
hothead zone.  (Should it have been named yell.*?)

I personally don't believe this is correct.  As with any other
hierarchy on USENET, and in the altnet, the content of any given group
is not determined by the hierarchy.  It is the people who use the
group that make it what it is.

Something to be wary of, though, is that since many sites _do_ look
down on talk.*, many of them don't get any of the groups.  This whole
"distribution of hierarchies" is such a muddled issue.  It is very
important to some people to be able to garner ten more readers in one
hierarchy than they might have found in another.

If you end up deciding that "talk.virtual-worlds" is the right place
for your group, I would say to put it there.  From what I've read so
far though, it just doesn't seem to fit in with the general nature of
talk.*, independent of whether people think positively or negatively
about the hierarchy as a whole.

Dave
-- 
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