Welcome

Welcome to WNOTW aka "What's New On The WELL". This is an independent blog, not supported by, endorsed by, or in any other way influenced by the managers of the conferencing community known as The WELL nor its owners Salon.com. It's just a blog about stuff that's going on on The WELL, or stuff that I found interesting that I first heard on The WELL.

A brief explanation of the items in the Navigation Bar at the top of the screen:

• Home: The most recent blog entries are shown on the home page.
• HOTW: Heard on The WELL. Something I read on The WELL that I thought was interesting or noteworthy. Might be a link to another website, a paraphrase of something someone said, who knows.
• TBTOTW: A long-standing tradition on The WELL is for folks to (jokingly or seriously) comment on a topic somewhere in one of The WELL's conferences by saying "This is the best topic on The WELL." It is especially common when there's a spectacular digression from, say, what was a serious discussion on current legislation on Medicare reform, but has morphed into a heated debate on the design of toasters or a MINI Cooper automobiles or the latest baseball scores or a series of worse and worse puns. So, this section of the blog will try to track places where folks are currently insisting *this* is currently the best topic on The WELL.
• Slippage: "Slippage" is a term used by The WELL to mean when someone's latest response in a topic was beaten out by one or more other responses to the topic first. For instance, someone asks a Windows question, and you know the answer, and by the time you've typed it in and submitted it, you find out that more than one person has already provided the answer. The WELL will tell you that other responses have "slipped in" before yours. Often, very hot topics will have a lot of slippage. This section of the blog will try to track those hot topics.
• Flamewatch: A popular, if notorious, conference on The WELL is called "flame.ind". In it, some WELL users comment on, chastise, or flat-out flame other users, especially those who have made what flame.ind denizens feel is an outrageously clueless or uninformed posting somewhere else on The WELL. The flame.ind conference is, strangely, one of the most popular conferences on The WELL. I find this disconcerting, and I tend to keep an eye on the day-to-day rise and fall of flame.ind in the WELL's top-30-conferences tally. Theory: the higher the flame.ind ranking, the less interesting The WELL is that day. Dread: the day flame.ind gets a rank of #1.
• The Numbers: Think of it as Harper's Index but for stuff seen on or about The WELL.

Posted by brian at April 13, 2004 03:10 PM | TrackBack

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