Exercise: Participate in a Conference
The best way is to just take the plunge. Visit two or three of these sites. You can discuss the big issues of the day, seek help in a health forum, talk sports, research business use of intranets. It is all there.
Message Board Central
Yahoo!, About.com, and Sympatico have directories to the message boards they host.
Yahoo! offers two services that let you browse and search web conferences.
- Yahoo! Groups (groups.yahoo.com) is an all encompassing web forum that allows groups to host discussions on the Web as well as trade files, plan events, distribute newsletters and more.
- Yahoo! Message Boards (messages.yahoo.com) are strictly for discussion.
Both services are organized by category, the first being Business and Finance. Others are current events, religion and beliefs, health, sports. There are some regional boards - by country or by US state.You can read the public boards but will need to register to post messages.
About.com has many interesting and valuable guides organized by category. Find the topic you are interested in and from within the subsection click on Visit Forums. This will take you to a web forum hosted by that About.com guide.
Sympatico Forums (www1.sympatico.ca/forums):
Canada's Sympatico has a large number of forums.
Politics, health, kids, relationships - there is lots to talk about. Sympatico
also invites people to start and moderate new forums. Read the
FAQs to learn the etiquette of forums and details about
hosting your own.
Special Online Communities
These are just three examples of the thousands of online communities that are formed around Web conferences.
Delphi Forums (www.delphiforums.com). Delphi Forums describes itself as a leading network of "member-managed online communities". This is the service the guides at About.com use. Register once and be able to participate in any About.com community as well as numerous other forums - choose from over 100,000. Browse the directory and look over the Forum Highlights. Delphi will invite you to set up your own forum.
Café Utne (cafe.utne.com/cafe/) Café Utne is the online forum for Utne Reader. It was set up as an electronic place where readers could discuss the articles in the print magazine or the selected articles published at the Utne Reader Web site. Utne likens its conferences to salons, places for conversation. Be sure to read their information page (Café Utne FAQ) for their definition of conferencing and a description of the Motet software they use.You can view the topics but you can't read or post unless you register. The Motet conferencing software is rather daunting. Spend some time with the Help page.
ZDNet Forums (www.zdnet.com/cc/forums.html): Computer afficionados will enjoy the ZDNet Forums (or message boards). Talk Windows, Mac, Video Games, Web Design - lots more. Registration is required to post but not to read.
Getting Down to Business
It isn't all current affairs and games. There are many applications where Web conferencing is used for business and educational purposes. Here are two examples.
Raging Bull (ragingbull.lycos.com) at Lycos, is a very popular message board for investors for watching the hot news about companies and the ups and downs of the stock market. Look for Herd on the Boards for the most recent posts. You can read without registering but not participate.
Docnmail (www.docnmail.com) is a registrar centre for finding online courses, many of them free or at least low cost. Most courses use community forums to provide support and encourage learning through participation. To see one in action, you might check the courses about using EBay, either as a seller or buyer.
Where to next?
What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of the message board compared to the mailing list or newsgroup?