[seul-edu] LWN interview

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

I think the interview Roman, Roger, Pete, and I did with Liz Coolbaugh
for Linux Weekly News will be published this Thursday (or next Thursday
at the latest).  The big problem was that we conducted the interview
over IRC, which was a new way to interview for Liz.  Given that we were
often responding simultaneously to different threads (if you do IRC you
know what I mean) it was very hard for her to put together a coherent
thread to write the interview from.  Besides that, the log of the IRC
session that she had duplicated the whole session at the end, doubling
the size of the thing.  Liz told me that she had three pages of notes
and was only 16% through the file.  I volunteered to try to move things
around to present the "illusion of coherency."

I chopped off the duplicate log entries and moved messages around a bit
so that the threads were serial rather than parallel.  I also modified
some of the URLs that had changed (such as the LENPP one) since the
interview took place.  I sent that off to Liz and she seemed to think it
was now much easier to deal with.

The upshot of all this is that if we try to do an IRC interview again we
need to be more careful about taking turns and not stepping all over
each other's comments, and about letting the interviewer try to control
the flow of discussion a bit more.  In other words, we need to pretend
we're not on IRC.  Not as much fun, I know, but it will probably get our
interviews published more quickly if they're easier for the interviewer
to make even a shred of sense of.

-- 
Doug Loss                 The difference between the right word and
Data Network Coordinator  the almost right word is the difference
Bloomsburg University     between lightning and a lightning bug.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain