Hi Philippe,
Interesting post :-). I don't have time right now to answer all the pros you mention for newsgroups, so I'll just throw in a couple of things that I think is flawed in your suggestion (rude, perhaps! sorry!).
Philippe A. wrote:
I guess you know what newsgroups are, and that they existed before Google. What Google did is to index them into their database. They did not only that, they also created a great web interface to browse them.
Actually DejaNews did that and then Google bought DejaNews, AFAIR.
) Not everyone has a Gmail account (required to post through Groups) ) Not everyone is adept to using Gmane
Right. But not everyone is adept of (mailing lists|newsgroups|forums|you name it). That's not the question. The question was how we thought things could be improved.
The point was that everyone knows how a browser works.
Newsgroups might be too technical to engage in for newcomers, especially if they're already *very* busy trying to make this new software they've downloaded (Wine) work and everything's failing right and left around their ears with odd 'FontForge' messages, seh_exception overflows and what not.
Costs (worse first in my own opinion):
- Convince existing users to configure their newsreader.
I think the above point is enough to be a showstopper for the newsgroup approach.