Names are Everything

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright

Thursday, June 12, 1997

I sent feedback to Sidewalk ( http://seattle.sidewalk.com/ ) a few weeks ago, suggesting that they call newsgroups by their correct names in their newsgroup links, rather than made up names. Names like "Seattle talk" instead of seattle.general irk me. It smacks of when AOL was trying to put their subscribers on the internet, and didn't use the right names for newsgroups. It made it all the more difficult for their users to comport themselves in an acceptable manner. Sometimes folks didn't know if they were on an AOL "board" or a usenet newsgroup!

Anything that puts people in newsgroups without their understanding newsgroup customs or ettiquette is a bad idea. They need to be familiar with general usages, as well as the specifics of the particular group they are entering, or else they drive everyone mad and get smacked!

I am also not thrilled with Sidewalk unilaterally creating new newsgroups in the seattle.* heirarchy, like seattle.siff. This is reminiscent of the seattle.p-tech debacle of a few years ago, when the Seattle Times newspaper started a newsgroup for discussion of topics in the Personal Technology section of the paper. The newsgroup was created without the usual round of discussion among Seattle news admins, wasn't carried by every news provider (and why should it be?) and immediately became moribund, a ghost town. The same thing happened to the seattle.siff newsgroup, since there wasn't a critical mass of posters waiting to talk.

I'd have no problem with Sidewalk creating a new heirarchy, for use by their readers, like sidewalk.seattle.* . That would be more extensible to the other cities they will be opening in, and more polite to usenet in general.

Maybe my preference is a reflection of my computer attitudes in general. I don't like friendly names for links in the status bar of my browser. In Windows Explorer, the first thing I do is not hide file extensions.

So I got one email response from Sidewalk immediately after my mail to them, explaining their rationale. It was almost a real-life case of the "bug letter", since it included this (not meant to be seen by me?) line in an internal forward before the part that was written to me: "How should we address? I'm not sure how to answer this..."

Then I got more mail today, saying they were reviewing the topic, blah, blah. It will be interesting to see if anything results from this!

Anita's Home page Anita's Book of Days Previous Next