Re: Web conferencing

Paul Everitt (paul@cminds.com)
Tue, 10 Jan 1995 17:06:55 +0100

On Tue, 10 Jan 1995, Daniel LaLiberte wrote:

> Brian Behlendorf writes:
> > I've become increasingly convinced that conferencing could be
> > more efficient using news://host/group rather than
> > http://host/cgi-bin/whatever. Comments?
>
> Conferencing, however it is implemented, requires some form of active
> notification of interested participants when something has changed so
> they can avoid repeated polling of servers to find out. Email works
> fine for this purpose until the number of participants gets large
> enough to justify flooded distribution to the world as in nntp news.

Doing caches to a local server, which might also store your authenticated
preferences and postings, might be the model. I'm using the Harvest
system, which can regularly go out and sniff around for indexing.

> WWW based conferencing is interesting because it may use multimedia, and
> because it is built around the archive rather than building the archive
> after the fact.

And for the little-used HEAD directive. Alas, more info should be
configured into the server and into docs (META).

--Paul

Paul Everitt V 703.371.6909 Email Paul.Everitt@cminds.com
Connecting Minds, Inc. F 703.371.1201 WWW http://www.cminds.com/