pearls

[Allan]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:44, Joel Stanley wrote:
> On 9/17/06, Allan <allan at choska.bold.net.au> wrote:
> > > http://digg.com/view/all
> > >
> > > http://slashdot.org/
> > >
> > > http://osnews.com/
> >
> > Though, if you're going to post links, you should at least give a
> > quick explanation of what they contain (and perhaps) why you think
> > they'll interest everyone else.
>
> The point was, all of the 'pearls' that were being posted were items
> that came from the above sites.

Don't you think you should have said that then?

> If you miss the information, you can go to these sites and read them
> yourself, or use a rss reader if you prefer them to be delivered to 
> your desktop. 

All well and good I suppose, if you visit those sites. I don't. I have 
neither the time, nor inclination to browse linux/os oriented sites 
unless I specifically need something. I have interests other than linux 
which, as it happens, have higher priorities. I'm sure the same applies 
to many of the other readers of these lists too - perhaps even you, on 
occasion.

Just for the sake of curiosity I decided to compile a list of the links 
that Romana posted. Using the following criteria:

1) From the start of 2006

2) Only emails to linuxsa (not linuxsa-talk - [which is probably where 
this discussion should be taking place, if we were following the list 
rules], to which I have set the Reply-to: field). And

3) Only the initiating messages in threads started by Romana (ie. not in 
replies either to or by anyone else).

>From the 64 messages that fit the criteria I extracted 100 links. I sorted 
them and did a quick visual check to make sure there were no double-ups. 
I then grep'd for "digg.com", "slashdot.org" and "osnews.com". There were 
10 matches, a couple of which were slashdot references to the same story 
as other links. That hardly qualifies as:

> The point was, all of the 'pearls' that were being posted were items
> that came from the above sites.

Now, I'm NOT saying that those three sites didn't contain those stories (I 
don't know, didn't and won't check), what I am saying is that only 10% of 
the sites posted by Romana fall into that group.

> If you find something that warrants discussion, post it to the list; I
> enjoy the discussion, but just posting easily accessible stories from
> around the web tends a bit towards the spam side of things.

Considering that we're talking about the internet, "easily accessible" 
would cover a _very_ high percentage of what's out there wouldn't you 
say?

As to the spam statement, it would depend on how closely the posted links 
match the guidelines of the email list. While several of them probably 
don't fit, the majority of them (from what I remember when scanning the 
messages looking for links), probably do fit. Note: I didn't follow 
anymore than two up, and one of those was accidental.

While I hardly ever followed up any of the links posted by people, it was 
good to see them posted, because occasionally there would be something of 
interest. It appears that's no longer going to be the case - too bad! I'm 
damned if I'm going to go to her site (or anybody else's for that 
matter), just to see what links they have found, so I guess I'll have to 
miss out. Ce La Vie! (Hope I spelt that correctly)

Allan