Matt Mullenweg wrote today this short consideration about the future of Wordpress mailing lists:
In thinking about how they’re currently handled I started making a list of how they need better archiving, more permanent URIs, better formatting, more searchable, and basically ended up describing a blog. The mailing lists should become a distributed, threaded aggregator where anyone with a blog can participate in the discussion given they pingback the proper URIs and/or use the proper tags.This is music to my ears... in at least two directions: on the usability side, websites are far more easy to use and access than mailing lists, and do not tend to be addressed with ad-hoc filters and sent to some limbo-mailbox a few days after subscription. In the end, people from the outside will always be able to peek into the conversation (either through single blogs or on central aggregators), and maybe even contribute to it through comments... but as the conversation grows, they'll probably want to be able to have a voice of their own, and here comes the second advantage... On the marketing side, this is a great push toward adoption of the product: do you really want to participate in the conversation? download and try it, it's just easy as that!
I'm just wondering... how different is this when you compare it to Web gateways for Usenet groups?
Oh well, first of all here is the info coming to you and not you going to the information. This shouldn't suffer from the "archive and forget" curse since trackbacks are intended to ping you only when you're quoted (and thus should be actually interested in the ongoing conversation). If you want more information, the central aggregators are always there for you to go and gather all of it.
Moreover, a thing I noticed over the years is that having a "distributed", hypertext conversation pushes participants to be somehow more clear. Let me explain: one of the bad sides of newsgroups and mailing lists is that often to understand the whole problem you have to read the whole thing.
What happens with blogosphere discussions is that you have several small clusters, each refactoring once in a while over the "main" stream and cross referencing in between where subjects collide or overlap. In a few clicks I've always been able to pinpoint the information I was looking for.
Now, if you're just doing a one shot search, the difference may not be so clear, but belive me, this is especially meaningful if there's some huge topic you're interested in. Instead of having to read all the messages to keep up with the conversation, you can read your handful of favourite sources and be sure that, if something interesting enough should happen, it will bounce through the blogs to you in no time.