Conferencing Systems

Other names for the same concept include: "forum", "newsgroup", "discussion group", "bulletin board", "group annotations", "conference", "teleconference", "meeting", "symposium", "groupware", "threads", and "notes".

Conferencing on the Web by David Woolley deserves special mention here as an excellent list of conferencing systems that should probably replace this list. Here are some other lists.

• Discussion Group Tools
• Web Week May 23, 1996 Comparison of Lotus Notes and Web collaboration tools.
• PC Week April 29, 1996 Product Comparison
• PC Magazine Discussion Group Product List
• WebMaster's Technology Notes
• Yahoo Directory of Web Communication Tools
• Forum One's Software and Reviews page

"Web Conferencing" by Jon Udell, in Byte, June 1996, describes a few systems relative to four major barriers common to all, according to the author. Web-Conferencing Benefits and Drawbacks as compared with NNTP conferencing.

The HyperNews project has added gateways to email and is working on theusenet gateway, and those pages list related references, including email (using MIME) to HTML conversion.

• HyperNews obviously does this.
• W3 Interactive Talk (WIT) is very close to HyperNews. The main difference is that WIT imposes a structure on the discussions in the form of Topics, Proposals, and a tree of Arguments whereas HyperNews has only base articles and an arbitrary tree of responses. John Mallery has written a nice summary of the issues regarding this dialectic mode of communication. Here are some other WITs.
  • Shen discussion
  • HTML 2.0 Spec Review Topics has a WIT-like discussion structure, though it does not use WITs.
• On-Line Debates for a Computer Science course.
• W3 Document Annotator. Quoting from that document:

  WDA is a system belonging to the WIT family of collaborative tools using the World-Wide-Web. Other members of this family are (in reverse order of their conception) WQA [¿] (World-Wide-Web Questions and Answers), WSRS (World-Wide-Web Service Request and Solutions), and WHP (World-Wide-Web Hit Parade). All these tools are offsprings of an early version of WIT (W3 Interactive Talk) obtained from Ari Luotonen.

• WebForum by Afzal Ballim - appears broken
• Forum News Gateway puts netnews on the World Wide Web.
• Public Annotations and Comments on Workshop Papers and Organization is an extensive facility for public commentary and discussion on papers.
• Discuss->WWW gateway has a nice interface for traversing a list of articles, but there is no way to post.
• Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) is an experimental conferencing system that you can use as a guest.
• Principia Cybernetica is also concerned with the evolution of information systems. They discuss the ramifications of having an annotation system.
• The Electronic Cafe will be a place for people to gather, a place of education and creativity, a place where everyone is equal, providing a link to 15 million minds at the speed of light. The Ecafe will be this and more, evolving via the imagination of its users into a local meeting place in the global community.
• Cyber Café Guide is a compilation of many cafe settings with electronic connectivity.
• small group annotation experiment is an experiment in using group annotation in support of teaching. The goal is to allow inline, shared annotation of structured documents.
• WWW NNTP fetches articles (by number) from a server and interprets any HTML tags found within.
• Organizing a Workshop Discussion on WWW discusses a facility to collect public comments on various papers given at a workshop.
• Biblical Contradictions allows you to comment on the contradictions.
• Network Money: The Future of Banking and Commerce on the Internet at GNN allows you to add comments.
• Ideas Forum at Birmingham University
• InterLink is a telnet based bulletin board with a virtual city metaphor and decentralized administration.
• ComMentor: Scalable Architecture for Shared WWW Annotations as a Platform for Value-Added Providers. The design is similar to what we have planned, with the addition of several annotation sets per group. Hierarchical groups (in which a member of a group may be a group) are similar to annotation sets.
• A Multimedia Bulletin Board in WWW environment by N.Frega (nfrega@giuda.deis.unical.it) and A.Volpentesta (volpente@giuda.deis.unical.it).
• National Performance Review Electronic Open Meeting Supports notification via mailing lists. It has a predefined set of icons that may be used to indicate the type of response you are making.
• Open Meeting on "People and their Governments in the Information Age" will be conducted through our nation's electronic networks including: the World Wide Web, newsgroups, e-mail listservs (mailing lists), commercial on-line providers, Public Access Sites, and dial-up bulletin board connections.
• Hot Wired has discussion threads. You'll need to "join" first, but it is free. See the Meta-HotWired, FAQs about Threads for discussion about the medium.
• Conference Room lets you create public and private newsrooms, controlled by a moderator.
• Time Inc BULLETIN BOARD HOME PAGE uses Hypermail for the archive, but mail is apparently not used for notification.
• xxx Announcements Forum uses a modified Hypermail.
• A Discussion on Computer Network Conferencing by D Reed, May 1992.
• Intelligent Archive provides integrated, intelligent tools for searching, organizing, and browsing scientific data.
• Feedback Loop is only half of the conferencing cycle, but effective none-the-less. It's also moderated.
• Launch Pad lets you add multiple hidden threads to each embedded "comment" in a thread.
• Futplex is a read-write system; the information in it can be changed and added to interactively, and all changes and additions are visible immediately to all users. Thus futplex is not just a place for storing information; it is also a medium for direct communication among its users.
• Lotus on the Web and Lotus Notes Information - a mailing list.
• WWW News can show the top level list of "subjects", or the whole tree, and it has a search capability.
• WebNotes provides three levels of structuring of discussions: forums, topics, and a tree of messages. The Book Cafe is a working example.
• Menno Bot's annotation system supports "menu" and inline styles of annotations.
• Scholarly Skywriting
• A Web Storybase is collecting stories about WWW experiences. You can add embedded annotations of the stories.
• net.Thread looks very much like HyperNews, and I might say, somewhat better. net.Thread Technical Support makes interesting reading. The Help page at NYTimes shows how much it looks like HyperNews. One interesting forum on the electronic media is The Future of the Newspaper
• Webmasters' Guild serves as an open forum for Webmasters and other Web enthusiasts to share ideas and exchange information. We hope that the organization will grow and flourish, contributing to the development and evolution of the Web as a medium for communication. Uses net.Thread
• Galacticomm's Worldgroup combines the best of workgroup software and commercial online services. Email, group discussion areas, file librarie, teleconferencing, surveys and more are built in.
• Annotation system by Bruce Edmonds, changes the document being annotated, and allows links to existing documents.
• The Mole System is a client/server hypertext system that supports collaborative in-line annotation. The annotations may be private or public and may also be annotated (leading to `threads' of discussion perhaps). Custom client required.
• c|net has discussion forums with embedded text and non-embedded subresponses.
• GroupLens: An Open Architecture for Collaborative Filtering of Netnews
• NewsPage lets you read news filtered and categorized by topic from over 500 news services. You can't respond, though, except by a letter to the editor.
• The Web Forums has a list of top level forums, a list of titled threads in a forum, and a list of untitled followups in a thread. It also has some nice icons.
• NetForum is based on forums, topics, inline non-titled messages, and a linear list of replies.
• Discussion Page embeds responses.
• Mother Jones Live Wire has a tree display that looks like HyperNews. However, links to responses are embedded in the text, and the responder makes the link by specifying the text to make into the anchor. Interesting idea.
• WebBoard is for Windows NT.
• WWWBoard - Matt Wright's Bulletin Board Message System for the World Wide Web
• Brian Harvey's Board is based on WWWboard.
• Interaction in*Progress adds two-way communication capabilities to your Web server. You can then provide tailored threaded message boards on the web, so your visitors can browse or post messages from their web broser. A multi-channel chat service is integrated into the software.
• WebNotes will be familiar to DEC's DECnotes/VAXnotes or NetNotes users. Each Conference contains Topics (sometimes called "threads") and a linear list of Replies.
• TCBWorks information is located in hierarchical Projects containing hierarchical Topics. Each topic contains comments and votes. Projects and Topics may be restructured.
• About(TM) Discussion Server provides discussions with the following features: Posting and reading off of the World-Wide Web; Search capabilities on postings; No propagation delays, eliminating redundant postings; Very flexible security options; Per discussion configurable headers and footers; User-configurable presentation options; Context sensitive help; Multiple user group support; Full browser integration; Web based administration.
• HURL - is an interface to Usenet news or mailing list archives. It consists of a search engine which allows for flexible searches against any article header elements, and highly-linked article pages. It is primarily meant for use with large archives of news articles, and may not be useful for someone simply wanting to link a few articles together. It is not meant to provide the features of a ``current'' news reader, such as the ability to post replies to articles.
• Proxicom Forum (was Podium) has nested threads (optionally), searching, and much more.
• Web Crossing has embedded responses appended to topic pages referenced by topic lists on conference pages.
• UnderNews II supports multiple frames, has a newsgroup list, a list of messages, and the messages themselves, looking much more like a usenet news interface.
• Discussion Web is a web-based groupware discussion system. It includes functions for synchronous co-locating decisions room type of discussions. The tasks suppported include brainstorming, ranking and voting.
• Allaire Forums provides a list of threads, grouped by forums, and for each thread, a threaded table of contents followed by all the embedded messages. For NT, costs money.
• Web Threads runs as either a cgi script or as an independent server process.
• Evaluation of Collaborative Classroom Tools: Groupware
• Digital's Workgroup Web Forum has threaded responses but only shows one level at a time, unless you embed with "dialog" format.
• Newsgroup Server - gateways to nntp news. Use guest/welcome to login.
• htmlscript forums have a list of categories each with a list of messages.
• On the Future of Journals: Digital Publishing and Argumentation by Simon Buckingham Shum, Tamara Sumner & Diana Laurillard
• Electronic Commerce Forum - I don't know what the system is called. Has top level list of "issues" and hidden linear list of "comments".
• ECWorld Interactive Forum - has some other software I dont know.
• An old list of conferencing/annotation systems - but the descriptions are good.
• i5forum uses frames to show a list of threads in one frame, each with a linear list of responses, shown in another frame. The body of each "response" is shown in another frame.
• Groupware articles
• The Conferencing Metaphor by Geoffrey Bock and Ronni T. Marshak
• Focus - Fully configurable web conferencing software. Especially easy to administer and customize. Use any web browser to change the look of the conference, create open, private, or moderated conferences, set registration options, and more. Many display options including Java (r) outlining.
• Focus Point - Web conferencing service. Allows organisations to host web conferences on the Focus Point server. Customer manages conferences remotely using any web browser - set up topics, change the look of the conference, configure access permissions, create open, private, moderated conferences, etc. No server required.
• Newslets are threaded news in Java. Shows Java's strengths and weaknesses.
• MHonArc - is an HTML interface to usenet or mail.
• Ceilidh - supports threaded discussion, automatic expiration, and flexible security.

1 Update on Futplex by Koen Holtman, 1995, Mar 29

2 email groupware: "pazzap" project by vznuri@netcom.com (Vladimir Z. Nuri), 1995, Apr 07

3 You may want to look at this... by Marc Tinkler, 1995, Aug 09

4 Web Crossing by Tim Lundeen, 1996, Jan 03

5 Embedded links by Leonid Delitsyne, 1996, Jan 22

1 Obtrusive Annotations are Tricky by liberte@hypernews.org, 1996, Jan 23

6 Where is Monarc by Martin Huntley, 1996, Jan 24

7 WebNotes link is blown , 1996, Feb 26

1 Many links on this page are blown! , 1997, Feb 13

1 Page needs Refreshing by tsulliv1@condor.depaul.edu, 1998, May 23

... 1 Message(s)

2 And this is a limitation of HyperNews by Mathieu.Veron@enseeiht.fr, 1997, Apr 07

1 Bad links different from lacking software by liberte@hypernews.org, 1997, Apr 14

8 WebBoard site change by Are Bryne, 1996, Mar 08

9 M.I.T. COMLINK System by John Mallery, 1994, Dec 06

1 Difference between Comlink and other Hypernews server by pauls@internetware.com, 1996, Feb 19

10 K-12 Student Collaboration K-12 Student Collaboration by , 1995, Jun 02

1 K-12 Student Collaboration ....Tell me More? by jsheehan@ncsa.uiuc.edu, 1995, Jul 06

11 Effective E-Discussion , 1996, Sep 26

12 TALKaway by StormCloud , 1996, Nov 26

14 Conferencing for Novell Web Access Server , 1997, Jan 08

15 Please add "Ceilidh" to this list by Richard J. Hughes, 1997, May 11

16 Any suggestion. by Daniel Wu, 1997, Aug 22

17 HyperNews - how hard is it on the server and does it eat disk space by Denise, 1998, Oct 14

1 HyperNews eats more than its fair share, but disk ought to be cheap by liberte@emancholl.pair.com, 1998, Oct 15

18 ArsDigita Conferencing Software and Services by Frank Wortner, 1999, Jun 21

19 Dir Affiliate Marketing by Ron Sheridan, 1999, Oct 08

20 Don't forget Slashcode by Neil Fraser, 2000, Jul 25

21 What about virtual conferencing? by Donna, 2001, Apr 27

22 Free web conferencing by Tom Smith, 2006, Nov 21

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