RE: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] internet egalitarianism (was "Need totalk...")

["Ross, Matthew" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

> I think you are only partly right.  Of course most things 
> 'published' on
> the net are not read by most people.  But the situation isn't 
> as bad as
> you make it out to be.  If Google has found your page -- and it almost
> certainly *will* find it if you want it to -- someone 
> searching for the
> info you are presenting could easily find your page.  It's 
> not so easy to
> find a rare book in the dusty corner of someone's basement!

Its also a matter of categorization. If I want to research how to make service X run on Linux distro Y and calculate parameter Z on the fly, I'm not going to find it in most books, and offline would probably be on my own due to the obscurity of such a book. The net allows us to find that obscure article through a simple search, and brings that obscure information up when its wanted. Libraries are great for dealing with broader subjects, but to answer a specific question, it falls short of the task.

> I've had the experience of 'publishing' a web page that 
> showed students
> how to configure PuTTY to connect to my Solaris box, then had several
> people I've never met write to tell me that they couldn't 
> connect!  The
> strange part is that I didn't even know I'd made the page 
> available.  I
> think I wrote to this list and said here's my new page:
> 
> http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/putty/putty.html
> 
> Next thing I knew, Google found it and so did everyone else.

Unfortunately, we have the classic problem of rapid information dispersal. Misinformation or incomplete information gets transmitted just as fast as true and complete information. You might want to add a note in bold or italic saying "Please note that Taxa is only to be used by students in my CIS999 'PuTTY, its not so Silly anymore' class." - This will stop about 1/3 of the people you don't know from trying to use it. The other 2/3 are overdue for removal from the gene pool.

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