[Qt-interest] Duplication of comunication channels (email vs. webs and blogs)

[Alejandro Exojo]

Hi.

I'm a little bit concerned about the duplication of places where you could 
read or ask about Qt. I'm not mentioning third parties, just sites related 
somehow to Nokia. I'm explaining my point through my experience and 
mentioning the new mobile Qt platforms at first, but I think all kind of 
members of this list can feel somewhat related to this experience.

When the Qt people started to release Qt for Symbian and Maemo, I thought that 
was really interesting, and I started to look for mailinglists that I could 
subscribe to, and lurk a bit to learn more, and see what was going on a 
little bit more closely and in deep than just following the blogs.

It was a little disappointing to find that there are no lists like this on 
symbian.org, all is (web) forum based (except for very specific lists that 
are for development of Symbian itself). For Maemo I found two mailinglists, 
but still the web based forums seemed the preferred way (e.g., some stuff was 
mentioned on the list, but only to point to the web forum).

That was many months ago (MeeGo wasn't even announced), and I thought that 
maybe at some time Qt Development Frameworks will create a list specific for 
handheld devices (I think that the embedded list is for the embedded linux 
port, so it's not the same), since the forums I saw were for Symbian or MeeGo 
only. I even thought that I could suggest the creation of that list. Given 
the good amount of traffic that this list haves, a specific list seems a good 
idea to keep stuff more organized.

Then I found that another channel exists on Forum Nokia (a web based 
discussion board), where probably all questions on the Qt General forum will 
be read by people interested on mobile software.

And finally, two weeks ago the DevNet opened to all. Again, there are forums 
there. But help forums are not the only source of duplication (there are 
blogs there too!).

Is not that I'm totally against web forums. I think the DevNet looks really 
promising, and it's just a beta. I understand that tagging, better search 
engine indexing, and new features can only be added in a web based interface. 
It's also less scary for some people. But I'm right now subscribed to tenths 
of mailinglists, and of course I can't read all messages, but at least I can 
follow many different topics a little bit. I don't think that anybody can 
follow that many different web forums on different systems without working 
full time on it. Threading also helps a lot to discard some part of the 
topic, and I only see this kind feature on sites like Slashdot or Reddit.

I also heard on a Qt podcast by ICS (who seem to know what they talk about) 
that qt-interest might go away. Makes some sense seeing that the DevNet 
provides a wiki and blogs, so it can be a full replacement of the Labs pages 
(if the two were kept, again there will be duplication of sites, with at 
least 3 different blogs). So the lists are the only thing with 
a "trolltech.com" tag, which might seem strange to people who are new to Qt.

If a "bridge" similar to what Google/Yahoo Groups is provided to harmonize 
people who like email with people who like web, then I'm fine, specially if 
messages have some link that ties them back to the web for the extra features 
(Debian lists have something like that, I suppose can be added to Mailman).

Well, I think that's all. Sorry if this is just my petty concern and I just 
wrote a long bummer. :-)

Regards.

-- 
Alex (a.k.a. suy) | GPG ID 0x0B8B0BC2
http://barnacity.net/ | http://disperso.net