There's been an information progression.
When I first started coding, the only "coding communication" was
with my friends and by reading books. When I hit college, I saw
that there was a ton of interesting discussion happening on Usenet.
Then somewhere around the early to mid 1990s, it all shifted to
mailing lists. In the past year, I've left a lot of mailing lists
and instead have been reading blogs.
Don't get me wrong, mailing lists are good for interaction, but
I find blogs the far superior way to share knowledge. You post to a
mailing list and it seems like it's lost forever. I used to post
stuff to my mostly stagnant web site, but that wasn't really
sufficient either, because it was a manual polling mechanism. You
ended up mailing off to mailing lists to tell them about your nifty
new web post. Very inefficient.
RSS changed everything for me. Now all the information comes to
me; I don't have to seek it out. I just tell my trusty program who the smart
people are, and it tells me when the smart people say smart things.
I can't imagine wanting to go back to the old way... and I wonder
when my program is going to get TiVo-style smarts and say "If you like
Don,
Sam, Joshua, and Ingo, then
you'll love Sam
Gentile and Craig Andera!".
