Yesterday I stumbled upon the WebX discussion forum that's been set up for me. It has the mellifluous URL http://idiscuss.infoworld.com/webx? 13@@.2cb4e7de. Coincidentally, my old newsgroup pal Jake Ochs had just been there and scored the first post:
Hi Jon, I think this forum is too hard to find for your die-hard fans. Perhaps you should link to it from your blog? Maybe make a comment link from your blog articles to this forum?
It's an odd thing, isn't it? My online life revolved around discussion groups from 1995 to 2001. The newsgroups I started up at BYTE became a movable feast, migrating from one server to another until CMP finally pulled the plug. By then, I was ready for a vacation from the world of discussion groups. The more loosely-coupled architecture of blogspace has all sorts of advantages that I'm still exploring and learning about.
But Jake's right. I've been guilty of Jeremy Zawodny's annoying habit #1 -- "Bloggers who don't enable comments on their blogs" -- and it's probably time to reform. 1 I'm not wild about per-item comments, but I like Jake's suggestion: point from each item to a long-running discussion that would develop a life of its own, and would feel more like the kinds of discussions a number of us used to enjoy.
That meant I had to register as an InfoWorld WebX user. Not having to do that, and being able to use your own primary identity in cross-blog discussion, is one of the great pleasures of blogging. But, how bad could it be?
Fill out the minimum fields on the form
Try username "judell" -> in use
Try username "jonudell" -> in use
Try lost password recovery for judell@mv.com -> no joy
Try lost password recovery for jon_udell@infoworld.com -> no joy
Back to registration form -> all data lost
Fill out the minimum fields on the form again
Try username "Jon Udell" -> accepted!
Log in as "Jon Udell" -> 404
Switch from Safari to Mozilla
Log in as "Jon Udell" -> Success!
Heh. Well, I'll give it a try anyway.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/03/04.html#a626