Module 2 - ICQ Group Chat

Tonight I completed a group chat with a number of fellow Net11 students using ICQ. It was a great chat and I found it interesting catching up with a number of students at once in a real-time environment. We were able to further learn about one another and how we are traveling with our study while discussing a few concepts which have recently come up.

A Small Downside
The one thing with large chat groups is the madness trying to keep up with the different conversations, one student described it as being in a room full of people all trying to talk at once. If one is not a proficient touch typist, keeping up with various side conversations can be trying. If you are like me you loose track while taking your eyes away from the screen to tap out your reply.

All up this was a great task which I feel yielded great results for all involved. I believe this may well become a regular session each week as the the unit continues (Tess has set up a Net11 ICQ group to help facilitate this). If so this will offer us a further avenue to share thoughts and ideas as we progress.

Module 2 - Chat Task IRC Option

I use some form of realtime, synchronis chat on most days. Whether it is Messenger at work for communication with interstate team members. ICQ, Google Talk to catch up with friends and family or Skype, iChat to keep in-touch with business colleagues and partners. I can pretty much safely say that at some stage or another I have used most forms of chat.

Because of this reason, I chose to go with the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) option to complete part one of this task. Fortunately for me I all ready have an excellent Mac IRC client, Linkinus, installed on my machine so all I needed to do was brush of the cobwebs and away I went.

IRC is a different beast to the more common Instant Message (IM) clients such as MSN and ICQ. For one it's been around since the late 80's and in general IRC takes a bit more to set up than an IM client. Once online though IRC offers a world of opportunity for obtaining and sharing information or just plain socialising.

The main difference between IRC and that of other chat tools is the channel or group aspect of the system. IRC was created not as a one to one chat such as MSN or ICQ and as such it is primarily a mass communication tool where a large groups of people can communicate. As the chat is conducted primarily in a channel, IRC can be useful for sharing knowledge amongst a large range of users working on a project or with a shared interest. In times of emergency or world events, IRC has also been a major contributor to news gathering and reporting.

Most channels which I visited had regular users who you could approach for help or to find out information. An immediate draw back if unfamiliar with this group chat concept is the speed of conversation and background chatter that can occur. If you are new to IRC or online chatting this can be very disconcerting. That said, if needed you can also have private chats within IRC which allow for a more restrained and manageable chat environment.

I find that once you are over the technical obstacles of IRC, it can be a very rewarding method of communicating. For one you don't have to wait until friends are online, you can just log onto a channel and find someone like minded (or not) to chat with. Personally I feel this makes the whole IRC experience more sociable than IM.

Module 2 - Newsgroups Task

Usenet and Newsgroups are not a new idea to me. Created nearly 30 years ago Usenet and Newsgroups could be considered the original Social Networking medium of the internet. For those geeks out there or those just interested (admit it, you have to be a geek to be interested) then check out how it actually works.

Like most people who have explored the internet over the years, I innocently stumbled across Usenet and Newsgroups and found some of it's more nefarious uses. Besides this murky all to common side of what now is Usenet, a lot of people seem not to realise how much has evolved from the Usenet over the last 29 years. Giganews posted this list "Worst. Top 10 List. Ever." ;-) 10 Things Started on Usenet which highlights some interesting contributions to the net from Usenet.

In completing this task I had a play around with a few options including Google Groups and a stand alone reader for my trusty MacBook.

To begin with I shot over to Google and their implementation of Newsgroups; Google Groups where as a Gmail and Google Reader user, I all ready had an active account. Google Groups is home to vast range of topics and interests some of which correspond to Usenet while some which are exclusive to Google Groups. Content is made up of some 3011712 groups available through the service. Very similar in actual content using Google Groups itself was also relatively easy as the interface shares similar layouts and features with other Google services.

Next I decided to download a stand alone reader with my first stop to find some software. After a little searching I re-downloaded a demo version of my previous reader Unison. Installing Unison was a snap, the hardest part was actually finding a server which a) was free and b) was still active. Thanks to Newzbot.com I successfully got online and trawled through some Newsgroups across a couple of servers. Again accessing the content was easy thanks to the beautiful interface of Unison.

Through the course of these two tasks I began to remember why I moved on from this corner of the online world last time. While there is a lot of useful information and discussion on Usenet, it is far outweighed by spam, or links to porn. Newsgroups for binaries dominate the landscape while even the heavily filtered Google service wasn't immune to these activites.

Usenet was probably once a very useful means of communication, yet today I find it is full of spam and host to the underbelly of the net. Yes there are still valid conversations and sharing of knowledge going on within this world, but I find they are far outweighed by the rest. Although I hope it doesn't come to this.

Module 2 - Lists Task

While I am a regular user of announcement type email lists (common subscribe to a newsletter type deal), discussion mail lists are something of which I have never been big fan or user of.

Mail lists have been around for ever and have played a large role in providing a simple means and opportunity for discussion and knowledge dissemination. While this is true, I can't really say they are my cup of tea. I think in all the years that I have been using the internet, I have been compelled to only subscribe to one or so discussion lists.

Putting my personal biases aside I went out and completed a little research, seeking out the hidden world of mailing lists. The results, to put it simply, have amazed me with what is available on the net. With my first stopping point Yahoo Groups, I found a massive range of topics covering all walks of life. If you want to find out some random and obscure information say about the world of Bollywood, then this is a great starting point.

So why is it so many people find mail lists relevant still? Not everyone has broadband, if your access to the internet is limited then being on an email list as digest may have great benefit to you. The ability to read the email offline would allow you to catch up with news and information at your convenience, rather than trawling through posts in a forum to find what you need would be very appealing.

On the flip forums or discussion boards such as VBulletin, SMF or PHPBB, offer a richer and fuller user experience which can require more resources and time online. From my personal experience, I find the communities created through these types of forums an attraction. Now coupled with RSS feeds available on most popular forum software, you can keep track of conversations or find support (now my general reason for using forums) quickly and easily.

Interestingly enough after this task I now have a better understanding of where discussion mailing lists sit in the wide web world. And while I'm not going to be rushing out to sign up to find out about Mermaids; I now understand how both forms of communication fit in the general scheme of all things net. And although I don't think either is particularly any better than the other for communicating information in general, each offers the user a different experience in communication depending on their end need or available resources.

As a final piece I found this great little piece by a blogger Alexander Gomes on just this subject. While Alexander's bent is pro forum, some interesting alternative points are raised through the comments. Enjoy.

Module 2 - Email Tasks

Over the years I have used many different email clients and services. Recently though, I made a step towards going all digital and moved my my primary personal email to Google's Gmail service. Gmail offers lots of nice little touches and I love it. Just wanted to share that before I launched into the tasks :)


1. What information about a user's email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?
You can get a lot of information from a seemingly simple email. To begin with there is the email address itself, is it a company or educational address or is it a free Hotmail account or similar. Next you can choose to display the email headers (it's where the technical stuff sits), from here you can get all sorts of information including delivery paths, formats etc. The only time I really do all this is if I am unsure of an email. As a rule of thumb, checking the from address and if there is a reply to address generally tells me all I need to know on a day to day basis.


2. In what cases would you find it useful to use the 'cc', 'bcc' and 'reply all functions of email?
The dreaded 'cc', oh how I hate to be the recipient of an email where I am 'cc' into the chain of communication. It's interesting to note that in the previous concept regarding "The mobility of electronic digital data" that the comment is made where as people begin to understand the mobility of data, they include more people than is necessary in their communication. Too many times I receive emails which have little or no relevance to me or someone has hit reply all when they should have just hit reply as there was no need for everyone to be included in their private conversation. For me those three functions should be used as such (and this is how I endeavour to use them):

• a) cc - As a courtesy where that person has been involved in previous discussions or there is a requirement for the recipient to be across the information.
• b) bcc - Used when email yourself a copy of a sent email or forwarding details to a third party to make second party aware. e.g. recieved an expression of interest to tour a DJ, as I was not the correct person for this I replied and advised the inital party I would forward their details on to the correct person who I had bcc'd into my response (I rarely use bcc).
• c) reply all - Only needed to be used if ALL recipients need to be across the rely to the original email. Use this sparingly.

3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?
In a previous life as a publisher and designer for a Hobart based street press, I was continually on the receiving end of files and documents which required propriety software to open them (even if our spec sheets dictated exactly the required formats, grrrrrr). Often to meet deadlines, time was spent racing around searching out applications which could read these documents or at the very least extract the relevant data. At times it felt all we were going to be able to do was try and feel the data in side the document, hmmm, yes, drive me mad did it young Jedi.

Of course now things area lot better, there are still some compatibility issues, but mostly they are due to people just saving in the wrong format or using some obscure format which died out years ago (or should have). Nowadays I find the best way to ensure an attachment can be opened is to ask if the receiver has the required software to open the file you intend to send. Failing that I will send the file as a PDF document. For me PDF has become the default "accessible document format" and due to inbuilt functionality, free reader downloads and it's ability to retain formatting of a document it's much more appealing than sending a RTF document. And now with the advent of editable PDF files, this format is even more powerful than ever.


4. What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?
I love email filters, if an email application doesn't have filters then I don't want to know about it :) As I previously mentioned I use Gmail as my primary email and Gmail provides me with a pretty darn good filter/labeling system. I try to work on a bastardised version of David Allen's GTD theory of an empty inbox, as such I try to pretty much filter everything that comes in and label it in the process. This pretty much leaves my Gmail inbox empty or very close to empty.

Work wise I use Outlook and have a number of rules set up (I am the Outlook rule king at work). My primary rules are based around distribution lists, which once run, leave only emails directly addressed to me in my inbox. This of course allows me to focus on the things which most likely need my direct attention. I found this method while trawling the interwebs after I first learned about GTD. Trust me, coming from a company where sending emails is near a sport, this approach has saved my inbox and my sanity.


5. How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?
My folder organisation is based on my filters. As Gmail's filters label email as they come in. I have everything pretty much catagorised and sorted as it hits my inbox. I can then either check all mail chronologically or each seperate category as I wish. This then leaves a failrly empty inbox where I can address those random occasional emails quickly and efficently.

On a work level. Again my folders are determined based on my rules, where each rule has it's own folder where mail is automatically filtered to. The difference is here that my inbox will retain all email directly addressed to me as this theoretically is mail which needs my immediate attention.

As you can see points 4 and 5 work hand in hand for me. Generally both these approaches allow me to keep on top of my inbox and manage my email effectively rather than email managing me. Geeky I know.

Edit: I have been searching for a week since I made this post, looking for the original site which introduced me to Dave Allen and GTD and in particular, the method that I manage my email. Now finally success: Jeff Sandquist is a Microsoft evangelist and it was his two excellent posts on managing email which put me on this path.


Thought for the day
It really is interesting revisiting things that you use on a day to day basis and looking at them in a different light. Looking at things reflectively always opens up new avenues of information or understanding so this process or re-looking at email is actually quite interesting and has allowed me to rethink one or two ways that I deal with email. Ultimately I think this will help me further refine my approach to handling and communicating via email.