From kragen@dnaco.net Tue Sep 29 10:41:56 1998 Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 10:41:54 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: rebecalist@bossanova.com Subject: website news Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: O X-Status: Somewhere recently I saw the quote: "Over time, all web sites come to resemble slashdot.org." I'm starting to think it's true. The reverse-chronological-order list of links, with editorial comments on them, seems to be the Platonic Idea of a webzine. Nearly every web page I check on any kind of regular basis is organized like this -- slashdot.org/, www.scripting.com/, www.camworld.com/, www.gnome.org/, freshmeat.net/, http://www.labs.redhat.com/news.shtml, lwn.net/daily, etc. I just ran into another couple of them this morning while investigating my referer log for http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/sa-beowulf/. Still, the vast majority of web pages I visit do not look like this. It's just that the ones I visit most often look like that. This seems like an ideal application for push media. Slashdot keeps running into bandwidth and server load problems, partly because every reader downloads every article a dozen times. This is wasteful. Freshmeat.net thought the same thing, so they put together a system using a high-tech push medium invented in the 1960s, known as 'e-mail'. I hardly ever visit the freshmeat web site any more; I just get a list of their new stories every day. (They keep track of the changes in the world of Linux software.) What are the advantages something like www.camworld.com/ has over just having an announce-only mailing list? Obviously it looks nicer, unless your mail reader supports HTML. And it's easier to click on URLs, unless your mail reader supports HTML. But beyond that, what? I'm on one HTML mailing list already; there are lots of others. Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker A well designed system must take people into account. . . . It's hard to build a system that provides strong authentication on top of systems that can be penetrated by knowing someone's mother's maiden name. -- Schneier