Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.
Thoughts on a new 43F board?
Merlin Also | Oct 24 2005
I like the Google group, and it's hard to argue with its relative success. Three thousand eight hundred forty one people (at this moment) are using it in some form or fashion, and it's been a reliable, relatively high-volume source of interesting conversation, great tips, and enjoyable elbow-rubbing. But some things about it kind of bug me. 1. It's flat - There's only one area to wrangle all the different conversations, and it can be kind of hard to keep up when things get busy (or, for example, when the higher-volume threads go afield of something that interests me) In sum, although I'm not married to the idea, I think it might be fun to try hosting our own conversations on 43 Folders, using prettier software that allows for more broken-out conversations. Although we'd be doing this less as a mailing list and more as a regular old board, we'd still have RSS, which is nice. Best of all, there'd be feeds, per topic. So Windows folks could avoid Mac talk and vice versa, etc. I don't want to disrupt the community on the Google Group by any means, but I'd like to hear what people think about doing a board here. I'll be posting more in the coming days about what I'd like to do, but feel free to give me your basic gut check by responding to this topic. TIA. 30 Comments
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2. It looks kinda weird...Submitted by justinlilly on October 25, 2005 - 7:25am.
Merlin wrote: 2. It looks kinda weird - On my Mac the pages have that weird "Google" look where the type is tiny and lines break weird, and, frankly, I never really enjoy reading the actual _site_ (as opposed to the actual posts in the RSS feed). In some ways, I think this discourages me from participating as much. A few things: Don't subscribe to the RSS feed, subscribe to it via email, tag the incoming posts so they filter into a folder, and use conversational viewing. This makes the process great because its all grouped by subject heading. Those you don't want to read, just mark as read and continue about your day. It is also much easier to reply to them because you just reply to the email. It promotes participation and you can view it on your own terms. Its google. They have data because they go out and get it. Guess what? If you host this board, google will eventually crawl it and it'll still have all the information that would theoretically be talked about on the 43folders group. Sadly, however, it wouldn't have my data in that case because if this board takes off, I'll no doubt just unsubscribe to the group. The email feature of this group is one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. I like information on my terms, not other's. -justin lilly (no funny picture or interesting signature) » POSTED IN:
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