[Air-L] Adding AIR-L to Gmane?

[Braun, Josh]

Hi All,

I was curious as to whether folks might be amenable to adding the AIR-L mailing list to Gmane.org (http://gmane.org/faq.php), which—if you're not already familiar with it—is a really great open/non-profit service for indexing and accessing mailing list archives. The development mailing lists for pretty much all the major open source software projects are archived there, as are lots of other interesting listservs. Adding the AIR-L list would be free, and since the archives of AIR-L are already public on the web it wouldn't be exposing private information.

Meanwhile, the benefits are quite nice. Gmane makes the list contents accessible via RSS, allowing folks to peruse them in their favorite feed reader.  It also makes list messages available via Usenet's NNTP protocol, allowing those of use who use Gnus or other reading tools with Usenet capability to peruse messages in a threaded newsgroup format.  Meanwhile on the web, Gmane organizes mailing list archives in a very nice threaded display (e.g., http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel) or it can display them in a format reminiscent of a blog (http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel); both these web formats are convenient to search and to navigate.

These additional methods of viewing the list contents would allow everyone to view the latest messages in the environment of their choice—on the web in a threaded or blog view, via a feed reader, or via a Usenet client.  This might satisfy some recent queries by folks who wished for a form of access to AIR-L aside from email, while still maintaining its integrity as a mailing list. It would also make it even simpler to access and search through the back catalogue of messages for things like literature suggestions, CFPs, or shared syllabi that you may have seen some months back and only now have found a need for.

It is true, of course, that adding the list to Gmane may increase the visibility of the list contents to non-subscribers, making it easier for folks to stumble upon and peruse.  Whether this is a good or a bad thing is up for discussion.  But as I mention above, the contents of the list are already technically public on the web.  And I somewhat doubt that this increased visibility would amount to much.  I've never seen the contents of a Gmane list in the top page of a Google search unless I was explicitly searching a phrase from an archived message.  And there are over 14,000 of other mailing lists in the Gmane index, amongst which AIR-L would be a relatively minor footnote.

I'd love to access AIR-L in Gnus and in my RSS reader, and I think Gmane would provide a great benefit in this regard.  But I'm curious as to what other folks think.

All the Best,
Josh Braun