Notify Me Checkbox

Not sure how many people subscribe to Joel on Software and got his "Building Communities with Software" e-mail, but it is an interesting read.  Drop me a line if you want a copy - Joel asks that nobody reprint the article on their site and has choosen not to make some of the info public.  Anyways, he mentions the fact that the "notify when somebody replies to me" is not implemented because it kills a site because people will post something, leave the site and never come back.  "The end."  This is somewhat I feel about RSS.  While having a news aggregator is nice and makes things easier to read more "stuff," you never get a feel of community and it's harder to get a feel for the poster.  For a long time I was reading blogs without an aggregator.  I got to know blogs not just on their content, but also on the links they provide, what it looked like, what software they were running and so on. 

And I liked it better.  Now you are talking to the person who will happily eat Red Baron frozen pizza (Peperonni only, thank you) and fried shrimp for every meal for a month, so my tastes and judgement are obviously a little, ummm, off.  But if you look at the popularity of the dotnetweblogs.com site, I think a lot of the interest comes from the dotnetweblogs.com page itself.  The one problem is that I've found myself visiting other blogs a lot less frequently because I really don't need an aggregator.  I have a community with some really smart folks that I can check out.  I like that better.  It's my "third place."

If anyone would like a copy of the e-mail: (pscott(at)newhorizonslouisville.com).