Groups, and group blogs
For a few months — as displacement behaviour while I was supposed to be finishing my book — I got in the habit of visiting the newsgroup sci.logic quite often and trying to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. But there is a huge proportion of sheer garbage (is it getting worse?), and too many idiots apparently incapable of learning from the small number of posters who patiently try to clear up confusions. I despair, for logic matters …
I mentioned this in an email to Jeff Ketland, another one-time frequent poster, and bemoaned the fact that there wasn’t anything between the hopeless sci.logic and the high-end but relatively narrow-focus FOM list. And he had an interesting response: he suggested that in fact the new thing — the medium de nos jours — is not the free-for-all usenet group populated with aggressive know-nothings but the group blog. And maybe he’s right. For example, I’ve just belatedly stumbled on The n-Category Café which is indeed fun and illuminating.
But the trouble is that, if discussions distribute themselves around a bunch of different blogs, how do we find what’s available? I wonder how we might put together a logic meta-blog to keep track of the good stuff?