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The Next RRE Project: What Good is the Net?writing

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The Next RRE Project: What Good is the Net?

``` The Next RRE Project: What Good is the Net?

This message is just for RRE subscribers; please don't pass it along to the whole world.

Send me a couple of paragraphs identifying the single most useful Internet resource you've found and especially explaining just how it is useful as a part of your life. I'll gather the messages together. If they're not too bulky then I'll send them out to the whole list, else I'll put them in the RRE Archive and tell you how to retrieve them. Identifying useful resources is only a secondary purpose of this exercise. The most important purpose is learning how to think about how media generally, and the Internet in particular, can fit into people's lives.

Here are the rules...

* I'm not interested in measuring how useful anything is in some abstract sense; I'm interested concretely in just how it's useful in your particular life. Don't worry about whether your life is going to be comparable to anyone else's. Tell us enough about your life so we can understand specifically how the resource is useful to you. Consider telling us a story about something you did as a result of something you got through the resource in question. Stories are more useful than abstractions and generalizations.* No advertising, no PR, no hidden agendas. Don't plug anything that you or your friends have a personal stake in, commercial or otherwise, even if it's insanely useful. We're all human and so we don't have a good perspective on anything we have a stake in.* It's okay to plug commercial resources if you're absolutely sure that you're not doing so out of the slightest bit of self-interest.* If your resource is open to everybody, please explain how to sign up or at least how to get more information. If you resource is closed, please describe it anyway but tell us it's closed and why and don't tell us what it's called.* No anonymous contributions. I want to reduce the overhead I have to go through in processing the messages. Your name and e-mail address will appear in the final version that I send out to the whole group.* The collected messages that I send out will be prefaced with a notice that goes something like this: "This file can be forwarded to anyone for any noncommercial purpose. It can only be forwarded in its entirety and not in pieces. For any other purposes the individual authors retain copyright over their messages, and you should get each individual author's permission first before making any other use of his or her message."* Don't list RRE as your most useful resource unless you feel you really have something fascinating to say about how it's useful to you. It would be fun to get a hundred more endorsements of RRE, but I think we pretty much covered that ground back in the summer.* As usual I reserve the right to omit your message for any reason. I may not even know what the reason is, and I may or may not offer an explanation. However, I fully intend and expect to include the vast majority of the messages I receive, and you need not worry that I'll be judging your message against some obscure criteria that I haven't told you about.* I also reserve the right to edit your message. I expect primarily to remove excessive headers and personal comments, and I do not expect to be changing your words, much less your meaning. I'm happy to allow the messages to express a diversity of styles.

And as usual, don't get intimidated by the rules. Please share your experience with the group so we can all learn to think about what it means for the net to be useful.

Phil ```

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