Re: Still on ads

["Gray,Gary P" <GRAY -at- BOS -dot- MSMAIL -dot- IDX -dot- COM>]

Mary Deaton said:


>In response to my question to the list about how people wanted to hear
about
>my training courses in help authoring, people seem split. Several people
>suggested I put it on the WWW, which I am going to do. But then the
question
>arises, how does anyone know it is on the Web? If I post a notice that I
put
>it on the Web am I then accused, again, of advertising?

Well, there are a few answers. One is that you are allowed to post an
announcement of the availability on the comp.infosystems.www.announce
(that's from memory, the newsgroup name might be different). Also,
you can go to several lists of WWW pages (the Yahoo list, for example at
http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/) and add your homepage to the list of
similar homepages.

Now, when people are in need of services such as yours, they can go to the
list
and browse through your homepage, as well as those of your competition.

Since everyone else seems to be voicing their opinion, here's mine: I don't
like
advertisements on this list, since to me, ads are usually 100% noise.

E-mail (I subscribe to the list via e-mail, I can't get the bit listserv
newsgroups) does
cause some disruption to my routine. Since it arrives at my PC, and
I tend to check it immediately in case it is something really important,
junk mail
on the list could add up wasted time for me.

I don't mind if, in the course of normal discussion, someone mentions
a product or service they like. In fact, learning about new tools is one of
the
reasons I subscribed to this list. I might not even mind if a person who
works
for the company that produces the product mentions it. In most cases,
however,
I'd rather have a customer talk about a product, instead of someone who has
a vested interest. If an employee of the company mentions their product, I'd
rather they give something short and sweet about it, and maybe point me
back to an e-mail address or URL that will let me get more info on my own.

Also remember that some ads are only really useful to a local area. If you
do
a great job training on something, that is nice. But if you're in L.A. and
I'm
in Sydney, your ad isn't likely to be of interest.

Someone said that they saw advertising on this list as the same as posting
something on the company bulletin board. I could buy that, but think what
your
bulletin board would look like if *everyone* on the list felt compelled to
advertise
here just to keep up with their competition.

Perhaps another option would to be to create another mailing list for
product
announcements and so forth. It seems pretty common to have .announce
newsgroups where press releases and so on are accepted.

Just some disorganized thoughts.

Gary Gray
IDX Systems Corp.
gray -at- idx -dot- com