The moderation towards consensus issue is a real problem, but how about this as a possibility?
On my site () I wrote up a piece on using micropayments to enable people to set themselves up as "editors" of a data stream, specifically in this case USENET (but it's applicable to any data stream, actually, including the entire net). People with less time can then 'subscribe' to these editors, who get some kind of funding based on how well they help turn data into information by pointing to useful stuff.
A similar setup could work on/. -- instead of the current rating system, throw it out. Let everyone rate everything -- but also let people decide who they want to use ratings from. that way, instead of being moderated towards some consensus, they get moderated towards a consensus based on who they feel has a clue (or who they've decided isn't clueles,s if you want to go to opt-outs instead of opt-ins).
If there are people who's opinions you respect, you naturally give them more weight than people who you dislike. you could build a moderation system that allows for that -- technically it's not too difficult, although it's going to be computationally somewhat expensive. But CPU is cheap. Wetware cycles aren't....
I think the idea of everyone being able to build a customized "editorial staff" to customize/. or other boards is a really great concept, because then each user really can take the entire set of information, and customize it ot their preferences, down to the individual message level, based on the consensus opinion of those they've chosed as their personal experts....
Seems to me that's what computers are about -- we're letting the computer do the hard work of sifting all this, by teaching them what to look for -- and doing that by using clues other people are willing to give us. (then add in some form of micropayment system, even if it's a shareware-type thing, and the editors, if they're good enough, can turn it into a revenue stream. The better they are at leading audiences to what they want, the easier it is to pay the rent off of the data mining. If guys can make a living building castles in Ultima for a living, why can't we find ways to make a living in other parts of cyberspace where it might make a real difference?)
The moderation towards consensus issue is a real problem, but how about this as a possibility?
On my site () I wrote up a piece on using micropayments to enable people to set themselves up as "editors" of a data stream, specifically in this case USENET (but it's applicable to any data stream, actually, including the entire net). People with less time can then 'subscribe' to these editors, who get some kind of funding based on how well they help turn data into information by pointing to useful stuff.
A similar setup could work on/. -- instead of the current rating system, throw it out. Let everyone rate everything -- but also let people decide who they want to use ratings from. that way, instead of being moderated towards some consensus, they get moderated towards a consensus based on who they feel has a clue (or who they've decided isn't clueles,s if you want to go to opt-outs instead of opt-ins).
If there are people who's opinions you respect, you naturally give them more weight than people who you dislike. you could build a moderation system that allows for that -- technically it's not too difficult, although it's going to be computationally somewhat expensive. But CPU is cheap. Wetware cycles aren't....
I think the idea of everyone being able to build a customized "editorial staff" to customize/. or other boards is a really great concept, because then each user really can take the entire set of information, and customize it ot their preferences, down to the individual message level, based on the consensus opinion of those they've chosed as their personal experts....
Seems to me that's what computers are about -- we're letting the computer do the hard work of sifting all this, by teaching them what to look for -- and doing that by using clues other people are willing to give us. (then add in some form of micropayment system, even if it's a shareware-type thing, and the editors, if they're good enough, can turn it into a revenue stream. The better they are at leading audiences to what they want, the easier it is to pay the rent off of the data mining. If guys can make a living building castles in Ultima for a living, why can't we find ways to make a living in other parts of cyberspace where it might make a real difference?)
Usenet is the worst possible way to distribute binaries -- you are sending every byte of every messages to every computer everywhere, in case someone someone might want to look at it. It's the worse possible distribution model you could think of, especially since you have to encode it in 7bit ascii to boot, thus exploding filesize even further.
Want to fix usenet? do away with binaries. How? damfino. I wish you luck. As someone else said, with things like Napster, there's no reason for usenet binaries any more, anyway. Except for the "I have a hammer, so this must be a nail" problem. It's there, it's used, and nobody can say "no".
The primary use for usenet these days, IMHO, is to be a place where the kiddies go so they don't annoy the people with a clue who left and moved onto real systems to get their stuff done....
Another option, now that I think about it, is a moderation system for moderators. Allow people to rate the quality of the moderation. Moderators with high moderation values get more moderation time, moderators with bad values get little, or removed ffrom the moderation pool.
Make moderators responsible for how they moderate by allowing the users to judge their work, the way moderators judge (or are supposed to judge) the posters.
What about moderation of people instead of articles? use the "karma" concept.
Users are given a certain number of karma points. They can attach those points as positive or negative values, to other accounts. Once they use up those karma points, they're gone -- but they can re-arrange those points if they want.
Say everyone on/. gets 100 points to award (or anti-award, with negative points) to other users. Over time, the posters that are a consensus positive get positive karma values, the trolls go consensus negative. Users can then filter messages in a thread by limiting their view to what the user's net karma value is.
There are limitations and ways to abuse this system, but they can be limited. For instance, one way to limit the impact of trolls is to base the number of karma points a user has to give out on the karma value of that user. So the more negative your karma value, the less 'damage' you can cause by spreading around karma.
If users knew their messages would have a global effect on their being read by others, it'd be a nice incentive to be careful about their postings....
Yes, I've used IRC. Not huge amounts, but I've used it. I've also used real time chat systems going back to the late 70's, so I'm not exactly a novice here. built them and run them, too.
And just finished a couple of months researching IRC very closely to see how it fit into my site. It didn't, and I saw a lot of issues with IRC that I didn't like technically and administratively.
Just becaues you don't agree with (or more correctly, like hearing) what I say, don't assume I don't know what I'm saying... sometimes the emperor is actually naked.
is IRC going the way of USENET? Getting so large it collapses under its own weight, but continues along on pure inertia because nobody seems to notice its dead?
Maybe USENET is a thing the IRC people should take a close look at, and look for ways to avoid becoming the next headless brontosaurus blundering across cyberspace...
Seems to me the bigger a thing gets, the harder it is to manage, and the juicier target you are to idiots who get off on destroying what others build.
Perhaps the answer is to move from the large super-net idea to multiple, smaller nets that cooperate with each other, and where these smaller nets specialize in content areas? At the very least, it'd make the entire beast less susceptible to single-point-of-failure issues and DDoS, because even if someone took out one of the smaller nets, the others wouldn't be affected (or affected as strongly...)
> Face it. IRC is the universal home of Those Who Have No Hope Of Ever Having Sex.
with someone else, you mean.
> Would YOU run a public irc server
actually, I just did make that choice for one of my sites, and decided agains IRC and for a smaller, easier to manage web-based chat system instead. Issues like this were a part of that decision, definitely. I just felt that running IRC, even non-connected, was setting things up for the twits to come in and start wiping their feet on the carpet.
ask anyone prosecuted under the "local standards" provisions for erotic content, whether it's Mapplethorpe in Cincinatti or the local comic book shop owner in Utah.
the problem with the definition is that if you can't agree on the definition, you can't build legislation or tools to stop it, because everyone has a different idea of what it is. And you run the risk that someone else will simply define what YOU do as spam, and then beat your face in because they don't like it. it's really nice to be able to point at stuff and demand we burn the witches, until someone points at you.
2) you use my resources to force me to see it."The same criteria would apply to your previous post. I did not ask to hear what you in
Yes, you did. Unlike spam, my message was posted to/., a place built to encourage discussion. and you voluntarily went to/. and read the message. You agreed to read the message when you agreed to read/.
You voluntarily read/. -- the message was part of/. -- you agreed to it as part of/. nobody forced anything on you. you came and got it.
here on/., there are two discussions going on simultaneously, and it seems some of the same users are in both.
In one, people are being righteously indignant that France has the audacity to tell Yahoo not to send data into the country that France finds offensive.
In this discussion, people are talking about how we need to stop spammers from sending us data we find offensive.
It's okay for the state of washington to pass a law outlawing spam (whatever spam is. Most people seem to define spam as "whatever I point at and call spam"). it's not okay for the country of france to pass a law outlawing nazi memorabilia. We find spam offensive. They find nazi memorabilia offensive. But it's okay for US to ban spam, and not okay for THEM to ban nazi memorabilia.
anyone else see a double standard here? Or are our ethics basically boiling down to "if we're for it, it's okay, if we're against it, it's not"?
If it's okay for the US (or a part of the US, like Washington) to ban spam -- why isn't it okay for France to ban what it thinks ought to be banned? Especially since so much spam these days originates from non-US hosts, either because the spammers are out there, or because spammers are using overseas relay machines.
Your right to free speech does not imply I have a responsibility to listen, or to pay for your speaking. "free speech" as an argument for spam fails for two reasons:
1) it forces me to hear what you have to say. You have every right to say it. You have no right to force it on me if I don't want it.
2) you use my resources to force me to see it. You want to say something? put up a system and pay for it. When you start forcing me to spend my money, for your spam, you're making me pay for your virtual printing press -- and there's no constitutional right making me pay for your babbling.
I'd love to read a fantasy novel by George Will. have you read his writings on Basball? Using Will as a person of narrow focus is very wrong here -- it's more an indication you need to read more widely, since he writes rather widely and quite well.
(of course, I can't read his political writing without wanting to throw it against a wall, but his basball stuff is wonderful...)
Unless you simply don't understand the rules, and are instead re-inventing what already exists because you didn't look around and do your research ahead of time.
There's no revolution in virtual communities. There are just people reinventing wheels and calling them fondue pots.
I have to disagree that designing virtual communities is expensive. I think we've been convinced it's expensive, because as the internet has gone mainstream, it's gotten big and expensive.
Just because you CAN get big and cater to a large audience doesn't mean you HAVE to. Or should.
I wrote my first virtual community systems in the late 70's, long before pretty much anyone had heard of the Arpanet (and long, long before the internet existed); I've been dealing with virtual communities of one form or another ever since, even though they weren't actually called that until reasonably recently.
Back in the early 90's, before ESPN.com, we were doing community stuff that tried to handle the net-at-large, because there weren't really any options. now -- there's many options, including the big mothers like Yahoo clubs or team sponsored forums, and the small/individual site really can't compete with that. It shouldn't try.
But just because you CAN get big doesn't mean you have to, and the costs to an individual trying to do this stuff have plummetted. Today, you can buy a box, stuff Linux on it, grab some open source systems and tie it together into a system, attach it to a DSL line and do it all for a cost that's affordable to many of us -- back when we FIRST did that (1993-94 was when we installed a leased line into the house and stopped hiding on our employer's hardware), it was a lot slower, a lot more expensive, and a lot harder to find stuff ready to use.
I figured that out about two years ago, and started completely rethinking what I was doing, and starting over building what I'll call the boutique community. In 1994-95, I was trying to build systems for everyone. Now, I'm building systems for people I want to be around. If others do the same, and we build referrals so that the right people find the right boutique communities, good things happen.
Just because the music scene is now dominated by House of Blues and Bill Graham doesn't mean that this nis all the music out there -- the small club and counterculture scenes are alive and well. Those of us online ought to take a look at that and learn from it. Just because ESPN, Yahoo, etc have wandered in and decided to dominate their parts of the net doesn't mean there isn't room for the rest of us --and on the net, it's even easier -- virtual space is a lot cheaper than real space.
Has the disaster that is the dead-dinosaur of USENET taught us nothing? Getting big or being big are not signs of success, and we shouldn't think of "big" as a necessary goal. For some -- sure. But there's MORE need now than ever for people to think small -- to wander into niches and fill them, to encourage and revel in being not-big and not-commercial. And it's more possible than ever before. who cares if you only have 2,000 users instead of 20,000 or 200,000? It's a LOT easier to build things that make those 2,000 users really happy, than building in the tradeoffs 200,000 users require to keep from being pissed off at you.
What's missing in most community builders that I've researched is that they haven't yet figured out that a bunch of small, independent communities that cooperate is better than one large one that attempts to be too manythings to too many people. So they think in terms of monopolizing an audience instead of sharing an audience, or cooperate with others just enough to try to steal someone else's audience.
There's a great opportunity here to build a real "club scene", or a cooperative. You can be small, be focussed, and be very successful -- and get together with other, similar sites and cooperatively work to build your audience. It's hard to have a successful club scene if every music club is three blocks frmo the other because they're afraid someone might go in another club as they walk to yours. But if you're that isolated, you don't get people walking by and curious very often, and you can't leverage common marketing.
The individual person CAN still make a difference on the net. Jus because the big boys have arrived doesn't change that -- but it makes the need for it all the more important, to avoid the genericization of the net.
chuq
www.hockeyfanz.com (an overtly non-commercial place, written and managed by two people in their spare time)
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to create .con, don't forget to create a sub-domai where congressmen can move their domains when they leave their post:
packwood.ex.con
rostenkowski.ex.con
tower.ex.con
Ack. Forgot the link. It's here: http://www.chuqui.com/cgi-bin/mwf/topic_show.pl?ti d=33
The moderation towards consensus issue is a real problem, but how about this as a possibility?
/. -- instead of the current rating system, throw it out. Let everyone rate everything -- but also let people decide who they want to use ratings from. that way, instead of being moderated towards some consensus, they get moderated towards a consensus based on who they feel has a clue (or who they've decided isn't clueles,s if you want to go to opt-outs instead of opt-ins).
/. or other boards is a really great concept, because then each user really can take the entire set of information, and customize it ot their preferences, down to the individual message level, based on the consensus opinion of those they've chosed as their personal experts....
On my site () I wrote up a piece on using micropayments to enable people to set themselves up as "editors" of a data stream, specifically in this case USENET (but it's applicable to any data stream, actually, including the entire net). People with less time can then 'subscribe' to these editors, who get some kind of funding based on how well they help turn data into information by pointing to useful stuff.
A similar setup could work on
If there are people who's opinions you respect, you naturally give them more weight than people who you dislike. you could build a moderation system that allows for that -- technically it's not too difficult, although it's going to be computationally somewhat expensive. But CPU is cheap. Wetware cycles aren't....
I think the idea of everyone being able to build a customized "editorial staff" to customize
Seems to me that's what computers are about -- we're letting the computer do the hard work of sifting all this, by teaching them what to look for -- and doing that by using clues other people are willing to give us. (then add in some form of micropayment system, even if it's a shareware-type thing, and the editors, if they're good enough, can turn it into a revenue stream. The better they are at leading audiences to what they want, the easier it is to pay the rent off of the data mining. If guys can make a living building castles in Ultima for a living, why can't we find ways to make a living in other parts of cyberspace where it might make a real difference?)
The moderation towards consensus issue is a real problem, but how about this as a possibility?
/. -- instead of the current rating system, throw it out. Let everyone rate everything -- but also let people decide who they want to use ratings from. that way, instead of being moderated towards some consensus, they get moderated towards a consensus based on who they feel has a clue (or who they've decided isn't clueles,s if you want to go to opt-outs instead of opt-ins).
/. or other boards is a really great concept, because then each user really can take the entire set of information, and customize it ot their preferences, down to the individual message level, based on the consensus opinion of those they've chosed as their personal experts....
On my site () I wrote up a piece on using micropayments to enable people to set themselves up as "editors" of a data stream, specifically in this case USENET (but it's applicable to any data stream, actually, including the entire net). People with less time can then 'subscribe' to these editors, who get some kind of funding based on how well they help turn data into information by pointing to useful stuff.
A similar setup could work on
If there are people who's opinions you respect, you naturally give them more weight than people who you dislike. you could build a moderation system that allows for that -- technically it's not too difficult, although it's going to be computationally somewhat expensive. But CPU is cheap. Wetware cycles aren't....
I think the idea of everyone being able to build a customized "editorial staff" to customize
Seems to me that's what computers are about -- we're letting the computer do the hard work of sifting all this, by teaching them what to look for -- and doing that by using clues other people are willing to give us. (then add in some form of micropayment system, even if it's a shareware-type thing, and the editors, if they're good enough, can turn it into a revenue stream. The better they are at leading audiences to what they want, the easier it is to pay the rent off of the data mining. If guys can make a living building castles in Ultima for a living, why can't we find ways to make a living in other parts of cyberspace where it might make a real difference?)
Usenet is ascii based, but not text based. something like 97% of a full usenet feed today is ascii-encoded binaries.
Usenet is the worst possible way to distribute binaries -- you are sending every byte of every messages to every computer everywhere, in case someone someone might want to look at it. It's the worse possible distribution model you could think of, especially since you have to encode it in 7bit ascii to boot, thus exploding filesize even further.
Want to fix usenet? do away with binaries. How? damfino. I wish you luck. As someone else said, with things like Napster, there's no reason for usenet binaries any more, anyway. Except for the "I have a hammer, so this must be a nail" problem. It's there, it's used, and nobody can say "no".
The primary use for usenet these days, IMHO, is to be a place where the kiddies go so they don't annoy the people with a clue who left and moved onto real systems to get their stuff done....
Another option, now that I think about it, is a moderation system for moderators. Allow people to rate the quality of the moderation. Moderators with high moderation values get more moderation time, moderators with bad values get little, or removed ffrom the moderation pool.
Make moderators responsible for how they moderate by allowing the users to judge their work, the way moderators judge (or are supposed to judge) the posters.
What about moderation of people instead of articles? use the "karma" concept.
/. gets 100 points to award (or anti-award, with negative points) to other users. Over time, the posters that are a consensus positive get positive karma values, the trolls go consensus negative. Users can then filter messages in a thread by limiting their view to what the user's net karma value is.
Users are given a certain number of karma points. They can attach those points as positive or negative values, to other accounts. Once they use up those karma points, they're gone -- but they can re-arrange those points if they want.
Say everyone on
There are limitations and ways to abuse this system, but they can be limited. For instance, one way to limit the impact of trolls is to base the number of karma points a user has to give out on the karma value of that user. So the more negative your karma value, the less 'damage' you can cause by spreading around karma.
If users knew their messages would have a global effect on their being read by others, it'd be a nice incentive to be careful about their postings....
> Even March for OS X was no surprise - CNET called it "late",
CNET's attitude is "if it's not bad news, it's not news".
If Genentech announced they'd solved world hunger and the common cold, CNET would report that they'd failed to cure the flu and it cost too much.
> Thought of running a MUSH-type server? These days they're pretty refined and the server codebases (e.g. MUX 2) are actively maintained.
Yes. I still might add a MUSH or MUD down the road. they're very intriguing, but I'm trying to do things in a supportable and manageable way.
Yes, I've used IRC. Not huge amounts, but I've used it. I've also used real time chat systems going back to the late 70's, so I'm not exactly a novice here. built them and run them, too.
And just finished a couple of months researching IRC very closely to see how it fit into my site. It didn't, and I saw a lot of issues with IRC that I didn't like technically and administratively.
Just becaues you don't agree with (or more correctly, like hearing) what I say, don't assume I don't know what I'm saying... sometimes the emperor is actually naked.
usenet is dead. You just haven't noticed yet.
is IRC going the way of USENET? Getting so large it collapses under its own weight, but continues along on pure inertia because nobody seems to notice its dead?
Maybe USENET is a thing the IRC people should take a close look at, and look for ways to avoid becoming the next headless brontosaurus blundering across cyberspace...
Seems to me the bigger a thing gets, the harder it is to manage, and the juicier target you are to idiots who get off on destroying what others build.
Perhaps the answer is to move from the large super-net idea to multiple, smaller nets that cooperate with each other, and where these smaller nets specialize in content areas? At the very least, it'd make the entire beast less susceptible to single-point-of-failure issues and DDoS, because even if someone took out one of the smaller nets, the others wouldn't be affected (or affected as strongly...)
> Face it. IRC is the universal home of Those Who Have No Hope Of Ever Having Sex.
with someone else, you mean.
> Would YOU run a public irc server
actually, I just did make that choice for one of my sites, and decided agains IRC and for a smaller, easier to manage web-based chat system instead. Issues like this were a part of that decision, definitely. I just felt that running IRC, even non-connected, was setting things up for the twits to come in and start wiping their feet on the carpet.
ask anyone prosecuted under the "local standards" provisions for erotic content, whether it's Mapplethorpe in Cincinatti or the local comic book shop owner in Utah.
the problem with the definition is that if you can't agree on the definition, you can't build legislation or tools to stop it, because everyone has a different idea of what it is. And you run the risk that someone else will simply define what YOU do as spam, and then beat your face in because they don't like it. it's really nice to be able to point at stuff and demand we burn the witches, until someone points at you.
Yes, you did. Unlike spam, my message was posted to /., a place built to encourage discussion. and you voluntarily went to /. and read the message. You agreed to read the message when you agreed to read /.
You voluntarily read /. -- the message was part of /. -- you agreed to it as part of /. nobody forced anything on you. you came and got it.
here on /., there are two discussions going on simultaneously, and it seems some of the same users are in both.
In one, people are being righteously indignant that France has the audacity to tell Yahoo not to send data into the country that France finds offensive.
In this discussion, people are talking about how we need to stop spammers from sending us data we find offensive.
It's okay for the state of washington to pass a law outlawing spam (whatever spam is. Most people seem to define spam as "whatever I point at and call spam"). it's not okay for the country of france to pass a law outlawing nazi memorabilia. We find spam offensive. They find nazi memorabilia offensive. But it's okay for US to ban spam, and not okay for THEM to ban nazi memorabilia.
anyone else see a double standard here? Or are our ethics basically boiling down to "if we're for it, it's okay, if we're against it, it's not"?
If it's okay for the US (or a part of the US, like Washington) to ban spam -- why isn't it okay for France to ban what it thinks ought to be banned? Especially since so much spam these days originates from non-US hosts, either because the spammers are out there, or because spammers are using overseas relay machines.
Your right to free speech does not imply I have a responsibility to listen, or to pay for your speaking. "free speech" as an argument for spam fails for two reasons:
1) it forces me to hear what you have to say. You have every right to say it. You have no right to force it on me if I don't want it.
2) you use my resources to force me to see it. You want to say something? put up a system and pay for it. When you start forcing me to spend my money, for your spam, you're making me pay for your virtual printing press -- and there's no constitutional right making me pay for your babbling.
I'd love to read a fantasy novel by George Will. have you read his writings on Basball? Using Will as a person of narrow focus is very wrong here -- it's more an indication you need to read more widely, since he writes rather widely and quite well.
(of course, I can't read his political writing without wanting to throw it against a wall, but his basball stuff is wonderful...)
Unless you simply don't understand the rules, and are instead re-inventing what already exists because you didn't look around and do your research ahead of time.
There's no revolution in virtual communities. There are just people reinventing wheels and calling them fondue pots.
I have to disagree that designing virtual communities is expensive. I think we've been convinced it's expensive, because as the internet has gone mainstream, it's gotten big and expensive. Just because you CAN get big and cater to a large audience doesn't mean you HAVE to. Or should. I wrote my first virtual community systems in the late 70's, long before pretty much anyone had heard of the Arpanet (and long, long before the internet existed); I've been dealing with virtual communities of one form or another ever since, even though they weren't actually called that until reasonably recently. Back in the early 90's, before ESPN.com, we were doing community stuff that tried to handle the net-at-large, because there weren't really any options. now -- there's many options, including the big mothers like Yahoo clubs or team sponsored forums, and the small/individual site really can't compete with that. It shouldn't try. But just because you CAN get big doesn't mean you have to, and the costs to an individual trying to do this stuff have plummetted. Today, you can buy a box, stuff Linux on it, grab some open source systems and tie it together into a system, attach it to a DSL line and do it all for a cost that's affordable to many of us -- back when we FIRST did that (1993-94 was when we installed a leased line into the house and stopped hiding on our employer's hardware), it was a lot slower, a lot more expensive, and a lot harder to find stuff ready to use. I figured that out about two years ago, and started completely rethinking what I was doing, and starting over building what I'll call the boutique community. In 1994-95, I was trying to build systems for everyone. Now, I'm building systems for people I want to be around. If others do the same, and we build referrals so that the right people find the right boutique communities, good things happen. Just because the music scene is now dominated by House of Blues and Bill Graham doesn't mean that this nis all the music out there -- the small club and counterculture scenes are alive and well. Those of us online ought to take a look at that and learn from it. Just because ESPN, Yahoo, etc have wandered in and decided to dominate their parts of the net doesn't mean there isn't room for the rest of us --and on the net, it's even easier -- virtual space is a lot cheaper than real space. Has the disaster that is the dead-dinosaur of USENET taught us nothing? Getting big or being big are not signs of success, and we shouldn't think of "big" as a necessary goal. For some -- sure. But there's MORE need now than ever for people to think small -- to wander into niches and fill them, to encourage and revel in being not-big and not-commercial. And it's more possible than ever before. who cares if you only have 2,000 users instead of 20,000 or 200,000? It's a LOT easier to build things that make those 2,000 users really happy, than building in the tradeoffs 200,000 users require to keep from being pissed off at you. What's missing in most community builders that I've researched is that they haven't yet figured out that a bunch of small, independent communities that cooperate is better than one large one that attempts to be too manythings to too many people. So they think in terms of monopolizing an audience instead of sharing an audience, or cooperate with others just enough to try to steal someone else's audience. There's a great opportunity here to build a real "club scene", or a cooperative. You can be small, be focussed, and be very successful -- and get together with other, similar sites and cooperatively work to build your audience. It's hard to have a successful club scene if every music club is three blocks frmo the other because they're afraid someone might go in another club as they walk to yours. But if you're that isolated, you don't get people walking by and curious very often, and you can't leverage common marketing. The individual person CAN still make a difference on the net. Jus because the big boys have arrived doesn't change that -- but it makes the need for it all the more important, to avoid the genericization of the net. chuq www.hockeyfanz.com (an overtly non-commercial place, written and managed by two people in their spare time)