I often get annoyed by people who talk about capitalist inventions as revolutionary, as if making more money is somehow a new act, and going to change the world. This is different, this is about making the online dialogue a viable public sphere.

Zest and Criticons

Someone finally got criticons working! Criticons was a proposal by Ping, that added a simple markup to emails, and provided for rich, deeply threaded conversations, with good visualization tools. Take a look at his proposal. Zest is a implementation in Python of those ideas. You can see some example archives it has created. Looking deeper, looks like Zest is also a Ping project, joining Roundup and Crit, two other super cool projects.

  • python-dev – proving Zest is still useful without the criticon mark up
  • e-lang archive – what it looks like with the mark up.
[via AaronSW](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog)

Would it work for just anybody?

I’m inclined to believe that the Zest interface would work well for small focused working groups, over time, rather then the hairy, branching, unmanageable mailings lists of IMC (up 519 of them – now that is dysfunction). But maybe it is a chicken and egg problem? Maybe with better archives, the lists would take on a different character? Actually I’ve been thinking about a project (on a back burner, low boil) to adapt the ideas from Ping’s Roundup, that of groups forming in an ad-hoc fashion around an issue, to a more general discussion space.

Smart URLs

Yes! They are talking about message URLs. This is an important, often overlooked feature of archives. I think it is critically important to be able to calculate a messages archived URL from just the email. This allows all sorts of collaboration to be built on top of mailing lists, and facilitates the simple (but critical) work of writing list summaries ### Rich Mark Up

I also want a mailing list that provides a richly marked up version of itself, probably as XML, that includes the sort of heuristics that are being calculated over at Microsoft’s Netscan, e.g most active thread, or most helpful community leaders. (yes, its scary for MSFT to be doing it, but its still cool) ### Death to Mbox

I would also hope to get away from pipermail’s(the default Mailman archiver) dependence on the mbox file never changing. We’ve had repeated problems, ( even with explicit instructions) where someone has deleted a message from the archives, but forgot to leave the necessary stub, thereby changing all the existing links in the archive, and destroying their usefulness as an institutional memory. I’m curious to see if its possible to do this work without a tight coupling of the mailing list software, and the archiver. I need to do dig up my email on, my ideal list archiver.