I'm baaaaack
and you didn't even know I was gone. Just spent a hugely fun few days in Bath (the town in the UK, not the tub in the smallest room) "helping" Dr. Brian P. Casey and his fairer half get married. As a result, I can wholeheartedly recommend several pubs in Bath and their local brews.
observation
The Shirky article that tritone linked to has a personally interesting paragraph:
But recently we've had this experience where there was a social software discussion list, and someone said "I know, let's set up a second mailing list for technical issues." And no one moved from the first list, because no one could fork the conversation between social and technical issues, because the conversation can't be forked.This very thing happened on the DSPsrv mailing list, which started life as pretty much a hacking list and gradually became more and more social, at which point the non-technical people started objecting to the technical conversation and a second list was created for technical stuff. Of course, then when one of the non-techs wanted to ask a technical question they'd ask it on the social list because they weren't signed up to the technical list.