The public newsgroups connected the editorial staff to its worldwide readership—or more accurately, to a self-selected group of subscribers and nonsubscribers who shared an interest in the subjects explored in the magazine and discussed in the newsgroups. Such an online community may seem uniquely relevant to a magazine, which by definition serves as the focal point for a well-defined interest group. But as we saw in Part I, an online community makes sense for almost any business. Your customers can help one another make the best use of your products if you provide a venue for that interaction. What they say to each other about your strengths and weaknesses may give you more or different insight than what they say to you.

The BYTE public web forums were a web reflection of the NNTP newsgroups. Why mirror the newsgroups into web space? As we discussed in Part I, many potential participants aren’t familiar with, or comfortable with, NNTP-based discussion. And some are blocked by their corporate firewalls from connecting to foreign news servers. To maximize the reach of the discussions, I supported both news and web modes of access. What emerged was a two-tiered pattern of usage. Most of the 1,500 daily users preferred the web mode; this group read and posted relatively little. Only about 150 visitors each day preferred their newsreaders, but these folks read and posted a lot.

I draw two lessons from this experience. First, there should be more than one way to do things. Larry Wall applied this rule to the design of Perl, because he knows that different cognitive sets require different tools and frameworks. The same rule applies to Internet groupware. People often need to arrive at the same ends by different means. The other lesson is that Internet protocols and data stores are highly interchangeable. NNTP newsgroups, web forums, Notes discussion databases, and listservs are more alike than they are different. Any flavor of server can be made to speak the protocol of any flavor of client. Likewise any data store can be morphed into any other.

Finally, the private newsgroups, as we saw in Part I, supported collaboration among editors who worked in five locations on two continents, sometimes from their offices via the corporate WAN, sometimes from their homes or from hotel rooms by way of the Internet. Secured with SSL, indexed for full-text search, and carved up into concentric scopes, this docbase was a key intranet asset.