You can participate in Internet-based discussions with others on topics
of mutual interest in several ways, including E-mail lists, Usenet news
groups, Web-based forums, chat rooms, and bulletin board groups. Our interest
is confined to the first three. Each is discussed in turn.
E-mail Lists
There are many thousands of e-mail lists, including quite a few pertinent to this course. To find them, you may consult various compilations and databases. One nice collection of e-mail lists relating to telecommunications (including e-commerce) is at http://china.si.umich.edu/telecom/maillists.html . Good searchable databases of e-mail lists are da Silva’s "Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists" at http://www.neosoft.com/internet/paml/ , Liszt at http://www.liszt.com/ , and Neou’s "List of Lists" at http://catalog.com/vivian/interest-group-search.html . If you should get curious about the e-mail list software packages themselves, you can find out more about them at http://catalog.com/vivian/mailing-list-software.html . Nagel’s "The Natural Life Cycle of Mailing Lists" at http://catalog.com/vivian/lifecycle.html summarizes the typical phases that most lists pass through. Do a few searches to discover lists on a topic that interests you, and that pertain to e-commerce (these may be distinct criteria).
The mechanics of subscribing and unsubscribing to e-mail lists is straightforward as explained in my "E-Mail Lists: Quick Reference" (in the Course Reader), although many people seem never to remember anything about this even after successfully subscribing to a list. The main mistake is to confuse two Internet addresses: the one that receives a list’s administrative commands, and the one that causes your message to go out to all list subscribers. If you have no experience with lists, please read the top part of Milles’ nice resource http://lawwww.cwru.edu/cwrulaw/faculty/milles/mailser.html .
Subscribe to the list called IPN-ECOMMERCE by putting
Subscribe IPN-ECOMMERCE YourName
in the body of a message to listserv@pride.dimension.net (leave the Subject line blank). This list is a pure "reflector", but few people post to it. The moderator, however, issues a nice weekly message. Turn in (but not until Class 9) the first message that you receive, and read the weekly messages for the duration of this course.
Subscribe to a couple of other lists among the most interesting-looking ones that you found, and follow them at least until Class 9. They do not have to be on some aspect of e-commerce, although this is preferable, but they should at least be serious lists. If you pick a dud (and there are many duds), try another list by Class 6.
Turn in (Class 9) a profile of one of these lists written in such a way as possibly to be useful to your classmates. Of course, you should not profile IPN-ECOMMERCE. So that your profile can be shared with your classmates, please put it on-line as http://internal.anderson.ucla.edu/student/YourFirstName.YourLastName/hw8list.htm. Full credit will be given only if this convention is followed correctly.
Optionally, subscribe to and follow BPR-L on business process reengineering. It has been quite good in the past, although the topic is past its peak now. To subscribe, put
SUB BPR-L YourName
in the body of a message to listprocessor@tpm.tudelft.nl
(leave the Subject line blank). But do not profile this list.
Usenet News Groups and FAQs
Read "Internet Discussion Groups: Soul of a Wired Global Business Community," from DejaNews, 1/98 (in the Course Reader, but portions are still on-line at http://www.dejanews.com/emarket/about/idgs/). This makes a nice case why management should take Usenet news groups and other Net-based discussion forums very seriously.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Question documents) can be extremely valuable, more up to date and complete than anything found in print. For your own benefit, you should become adept at finding ones that relate to your interests. Visit "Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive" at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/, which currently has more than 3300 FAQs and other periodic postings (about 138 megabytes worth). The two most important access methods are Full Text Search and By-Archive-name, so experiment with the first a bit and scan portions of the second. When you become more familiar with Usenet naming conventions, access By Newsgroups will also be useful. Locate and glance through "running-faq/beginners/part1", which is posted regularly to rec.running, news.answers, and several other news groups.
View a couple of other FAQs of interest to you. Optionally, visit these similar sites: http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/internet/news/faq/by_category.index.html maintained by Oxford University, and http://www.cis.ohio- state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/top.html maintained at Ohio State.
Searching for FAQs of interest has a nice byproduct: it often reveals to you some Usenet news groups of interest. But there are other ways to find news groups.
A very good one is via DejaNews, with which you already have some acquaintance. When you search on topics of interest in DejaNews, you come upon news groups that may be regular producers of interesting messages. Make a point of collecting the names of promising-looking news groups.
It turns out that DejaNews has a refined version of this approach in the form of what they call their Interest Finder at http://www.dejanews.com/home_if.shtml. Try it out. Notice that when you click on one of the resulting news groups, you filter the messages of that group based on your original Interest Finder search phrase. This is very nice for finding messages of interest, but the main point to notice here is that this is a good way to discover news groups of interest. Do some searches with Interest Finder using some e-commerce terms, and make a note of the promising news groups you find.
DejaNews is wonderful for searching but barely adequate for keeping up with your favorite news groups. That requires a true newsreader. In this class we’ll use Netscape’s Collabra, which is part of Netscape Communicator (but if you are already well familiar with Microsoft’s news reader or any other dedicated news reader program, you may continue to use that). Crank it up and learn the basics by trial and error with the help of the associated Help files (or any independently-produced tutorial), studiously ignoring features relating to downloading for off-line work and security. You need to become pretty well acquainted with the Message Center window, the Subscribe to Discussion Groups window, the Message List window, and the Composition window. Aim to become comfortable:
Keep up with at least a couple of your subscribed groups at least until Class 9. "keeping up" means sifting through all new messages before they are dropped by our news server, so that you don’t miss anything important. Post at least one message to a real news group after you send a test post to ucla.test or to la.test . Posting to news.newusers.questions is always a possibility.
Turn in (Class 9) your post, a list of the news groups that you kept up with, and a profile of one of these groups that was not suggested by me. So that your profile can be shared with your classmates, please put it on-line as http://internal.anderson.ucla.edu/student/YourFirstName.YourLastName/hw8usenet.htm. Full credit will be given only if this convention is followed correctly.
Optionally, read E. Ackermann’s "Searching Email Discussion
Group Archives and Usenet Newsgroup Archives" at http://www.mwc.edu/ernie/search/search-web11.html
. This is a fine tutorial on email lists and Usenet. Nice accompanying
documents are available at http://www.mwc.edu/ernie/Lrn-web04.html
and http://www.mwc.edu/ernie/Lrn-web05.html.
Another fine resource is the news.newusers.questions Links Page at http://www.enteract.com/~katew/nnq/nnqlinks.html.
Web-based Forums
The "Internet Discussion Groups: Soul of a Wired Global Business Community" reading mentioned earlier applies as well to Web-based forums as it does to Usenet news groups.
There are many thousands of Web-based forums, including quite a few pertinent to this course or to topics of personal or professional interest to you. Undoubtedly you already have encountered such forums while visiting different Web sites. You may have noticed that some languish for lack of use, while others brim over with content. As with e-mail lists and Usenet news groups, moderated Web-based forums tend to be of higher quality than non-moderated ones. Good forums are often noted on compilations of Web resources. For this exercise, you will use what may be the best search engine that focuses on Web-based forums: Forum One at www.forumone.com .
The mechanics of reading and participating in such forums is simpler than the mechanics of e-mail lists and Usenet news groups, since your Web browser is all you need. No need to subscribe or unsubscribe; if you want a short list of your favorite forums, just use your browser to bookmark them in their own folder.
Go to Forum One. Study the About Forum One page, and review the pages on Featured Forums, Mega Forums, Business and Finance forums, and any other categories that appeal to you. Study the Help and Advanced Search pages, and do a few searches on topics of professional interest.
Now look at 4-6 forums in detail, both those resulting from your searches and those you found in Forum One’s recommendations as categorized on the main page. Some of these should pertain to e-commerce. This means reading quite a few postings in each of these forums. Pay particular attention to forums that look like they could be part of budding or actual virtual communities as defined by the Hagel and Armstrong book (they mention some). You might also want to look at a couple of the forums mentioned in the "Internet Communities" article that you read from Business Week as part of your Week 4 Assignment. The Champy et al. article (Week 7 Assignment) also mentions a few noteworthy forums. Make notes about particular forums that may interest you.
Follow some of your favorite forums at least until Class 9, and post a couple of messages if you see an opportunity.
Turn in (Class 9) a list of the best forums that you found and any messages that you post, and write a profile of one of these in a way that may be useful to your classmates. So that your profile can be shared with them, please put it on-line as http://internal.anderson.ucla.edu/student/YourFirstName.YourLastName/hw8forum.htm. Full credit will be given only if this convention is followed correctly.
What guidelines should you follow when writing your profiles? I want to leave a good deal of flexibility, but below are some aspects you might consider commenting on selectively along with whatever else you consider important. In the end, you will be judged on the apparent diligence and care with which you approached this assignment.