[Alberg30] Alberg 30 photos

[George Dinwiddie]

Actually, I have no fixed quota.  That's one of the reasons I chose the 
ISP that I did.

I've had a web site for the Alberg 30 Association for 8 years, a fairly 
long time in cyberspace.  I set up a mailing list, first on OneList 
(remember them) which was swallowed by eGroups which was swallowed by 
Yahoo!  Yahoo! sometimes included web-bugs in their email advertising, 
which I consider to be an invasion of privacy.  (It allows them to see 
everytime you read that email in an html-enabled mail client, and can 
sometimes be traced to your email address.)  That was one of the things 
that convinced me it was time for the alberg30.org domain.

The purpose of all this was
   1. to interest people in the Alberg 30 and provide information to 
interested people, and
   2. to enable the out-of-Annapolis members to become a more active 
part of the Association.

I've been involved with online communities since the mid 1980's on 
Compuserve.  The mailing list seemed, to me, to be the best vehicle for 
creating a community of Alberg 30 enthusiasts.  I've built this 
community slowly over time, as it's been more of a hobby than a job. 
I'm paid more attention to discussing the boats than to adding whiz-bang 
technology to the site.  I spend much more time on it than I should, 
answering email, deleting spam and viruses, and adding useful 
information to the site.  I've done this through a time-period that 
included a parade of jobs, and kept the site from being dependent on any 
of those jobs.

I have no problem with other people putting up sites about the Alberg 
30.  In fact, I think it's a great idea.  I've got links from here to 
some of them.  Anyone can add a link in the Collaborate section; I don't 
have the time to keep a link list up to date.

But we've got a relatively small community, here.  That's probably good, 
as it keeps the message volume manageable.  (I'm on some lists that hit 
over a hundred messages a day.)  We've achieved a large enough community 
that it seems to be self-sustaining.

But when someone else puts up a site offering online discussion groups 
and proposing to be a community of Alberg 30 sailors, I fear that the 
community will split and no longer have that critical mass that makes an 
online community work.  That's why I pretty much shut down the 
yahoogroups list after I started this one.  There's no point in having 
to check two places for the same discussions.  People will use one or 
the other, and with the current number of people involved, it's likely 
that both will suffer from the split.

And when someone else goes to one community to tout another community on 
the same topic, it's generally called poaching if they haven't asked 
permission first.  Now, after this discussion, I don't think that's what 
Bill intended, but his intent was not clear to me at first.

After all this is said, I will continue to run this site as I have done, 
for those that want to participate, for as long as it seems to me to be 
worthwhile.  I welcome feedback on the site and mailing list, but I 
think it's time to return to sailing topics.  That's the key thing.

  - George

T.C. Williams wrote:
> I agree that George should be applauded for his work.  But the key thing 
> I haven't seen mentioned is that Bill's company is giving the space 
> away.  I'm sure George is being charged a small fee by someone for the 
> priveledge of hosting Alberg30.org.  And you can be sure there is a 
> limit to the amount of disk space George is allowed to use.  If you 
> start letting everybody upload all of their wonderful 1MB+ files to the 
> web site, that space will soon be exhausted.  Bill is offering more room 
> for free.
> 
> Thanks Bill and Thanks George,
> 
> TC Williams
> Argo #247

-- 
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Hope your road is a long one.                        George Dinwiddie
   May there be many summer mornings when,       gdinwiddie at alberg30.org
   with what pleasure, what joy,                 http://www.Alberg30.org
   you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
                                            from 'Ithaka' by C.P. Cavafy
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

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