Re: ATTN: Rollie Parish et al...

[Rollie Parrish <rparrish@flightweb.com>]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Jeff Miller wrote:

> Just wanted to share this bit of criticism and hope it is well received by
> the group. Personally Rollie, if I were the list manager I would not make
> our comments available to the search engines. Butthen again, the list is
> under your management.

Jeff -

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure if the responses we've seen qualify
as "well received by the group" but I do appreciate your taking a risk and
posting your concerns. I think you had covered in your original post
pretty much what everyone else has said in response, so it's obvious you
already realized the pros and cons of posting in public forums.

You brought up a valid point, though, about the Flightmed forum being kept
private vs. public and I thought would be worthwhile to explain why it's
always been public. The main reason is that we wanted the list to consist
of high quality, professional discussions that would be of benefit to ALL
air medical professionals. Having an archive of old discussions that is a
key to meeting this goal. Also, as a public forum, people posting messages
should be less likely to air dirty laundry or disparaging comments about
their competition, their own programs, etc.

While we could limit the search engines from cataloguing the Flightmed
Archives, I know that on a number of occassions, while searching the
Internet for specific information on air medical transport, the first
results have been postings on Flightmed. What this means to me is that in
some cases, this forum has been the best source of that information that
would not have been available had the search engines not picked it up.

Again, I truly appreciate the fact that you brought this up, especially
that you did so publicly and not just in a private message, so everyone
else could benefit from the lesson you learned. Far better for someone to
learn this way than after they've posted something negative that would
later come back to haunt them.

BTW, for the record, the Flightmed list manager is Alan Dobrowlski, not
me. I just handle the technical stuff since the software that makes the
whole thing work is on the FlightWeb site. I don't want to speak for Alan,
but we don't often run into things here that require 'coordinating', so
he's not as up front and visible as he deserves to be. He always has
played a critical role in this mailing list. He deserves a ton of credit
for getting it started over six years ago and helping developing it into a
mature on-line community.

Later

 --
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Rollie Parrish
rparrish@flightweb.com
FlightWeb: For Air Medical Professionals
http://www.flightweb.com




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