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CONFERENCING 101 PAGE ONE by David Hudson Anyone who logged onto the Internet for the first time during the last few years was probably greeted initially by the dazzling face of the Web. It was the Web that sparked the media blitz hyping the Internet in the mid-'90s, enticing tens of millions of newbies to look at their personal computers as more than just a tool for the home office. Now, computers could also be a source of on-demand entertainment and information. Businesses ranging from multinational corporations to the local Mom and Pop store on the corner also discovered the 'Net (about a quarter of a century after its creation), setting up shop with Web sites and investing in banner ads, those billboards along what we were then calling the Information Superhighway. But as nifty as it was to pull up pages from halfway around the world that looked as if they might have been ripped from a glossy magazine, something vital was missing, something unique to what the online experience had been before the Web. That something was other people. After surfing aimlessly for a few nights, those newbies may well have wondered what all the fuss was about, while businesses found themselves looking in vain for a quick return on their investments. But if the talk of 1996 was the looming Great Web Wipeout, there was a new rejuvenated buzz the following year. The word for it was "community." Business Week was impressed enough with the success of Internet communities to feature the phenomenon on its cover. And while other models — such as the online magazine or the Web site as company brochure — bled cash, cut staff, or shut down altogether, business consultants John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong found an incredibly receptive audience for their book, Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities.
The ways people get together online can be loosely lumped into three basic categories: e-mail, chat, and conferencing. E-mail, still one of the 'Net's most popular applications, can be also put to use as an ad hoc conferencing system by simply CC'ing one or more recipients. Then, of course, there are the mailing lists, running on software such as listserv or majordomo, and as primitive (and cheap!) as these may be, some still prefer this version of online conferencing over all others. Mailing lists are rudimentary but effective. When someone on the list has a message to convey, the missive is zapped immediately into your in-box — and if you reply, you reply to everyone at once (some of the better mailing lists offer a "digest version," compling all the posts from a given day into one long e-mail). In a sense, mailing lists are a cross between the virtual community and push media, though they precede the hype behind both. (A terrific resource for finding out more about how mailing lists work, how to set up one of your own with services such as VP or Coollist, plus general news from the world of mailing lists is Liszt, which also includes a searchable and browseable database of over 71,000 lists, complete with descriptions.) Live chat accounts for a full third of the hours users rack up at America Online, and Internet Relay Chat has a rich and venerable history of its own. Popularly associated with flirting, chat can also play an important role during times of crisis as it did after the Kobe earthquake or during the Gulf War.
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