> 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/