Re: web page doings
Katherine Brown (kbrown who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Wed, 25 Sep 1996 09:17:12 -0700 (PDT)
Hi Mike and Pim
This is an interesting situation that reflects the changing uses and intentions
of web pages. Perhaps one idea would be to ask people to limit the information
on their self-descriptions to things that will remain true about themselves
over several months. I was working under the assumption that there would be
regular monitoring of the webpage and lots of "in-progress" information
coming and going. Conference announcements, paper drafts, not polished works,
job announcements, who knows? So in my self-description, I noted that I
was still writing my dissertation. I see in some other people's self de-
scriptions things that are surely not reflective of their current work and
location, etc. What do we want the mca web page to be useful for? What
is a reasonable amount of time to expect the maintainer to spend looking in
on its contents to see if it is current and timely? Where might we want
links to other sites to be? One key function is using it to find likeminded
people, so the email addresses need to be monitored. For example is Peter
Smagorinsky's address (in Oklahoma) correct? Angel Lins? I see that
some people have re-sent self descriptions. DOes everyone need to do this?
I would love to see on XMCA some coverage of what people liked about the
conference in Geneva. Are procedings available?
ANyway, I am sure it is no surprise to people who look at a lot of web pages
that some of the information found on/in/through them is old. I have found
websites that were made right after NETSCAPE hit the market, and have sat
there as static as you please since them, awaiting the challenging uses that
would make them more than fancy front ends to stale mail files....We are
ahead of that case somewhat, now lets think about what we want the xmca pages
to do for us as a virtual community....
Katherine Brown