From: cyberoid@u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson) Subject: ADMIN: Announcing sci.virtual-worlds.apps Date: Sun, 3 Jan 93 22:27:12 -0800 ANNOUNCING SCI.VIRTUAL-WORLDS.APPS! ----------------------------------- This message just appeared on sci.virtual-worlds.apps: WELCOME to sci.virtual-worlds.apps from your Principal Co-moderators, Bob Jacobson and Mark DeLoura. In the next week we'll be putting the final touches on this new newsgroup; in the meantime, we thought you'd like to know more about it. YOU MAY SUBSCRIBE TO SCI.V-W.APPS IMMEDIATELY BUT NO POSTING WILL GO UP UNTIL NEXT WEEKEND (JAN. 9-10). WE RECOMMEND YOU WAIT UNTIL THEN TO SEND POSTS AND EMAIL. We are pleased to invite you to a moderated discussion of virtual worlds technology as it is being applied today and will be applied tomorrow. This newsgroup is different from many of those on the USENET. sci.virtual-worlds.apps is designed as an online "magazine," with regular columns by selected individuals as well as daily submissions from the participants Regional Co-moderators will be keeping us up to date on developments around the world and specialists in applied technology will be posting regular commentaries on key trends and events, as they see them. In this way we hope to provide you with an online experience that rewards the precious time you spend with us. We'll be introducing our Regional Co-moderators over the next few weeks. Currently, we are finalizing arrangements with prospective Regional Co-moderators from Japan, Korea, Singapore, Australia, Canada, the United States, Latin America, Britain, Italy, Germany, and Sweden. If you are from somewhere else and would like to be a Regional Co-moderator, please send email to us in this regard. We also welcome aspiring "domain specialists" who can report by industrial sectors. Your postings generally will be classified by the field of industry/arts/education that they affect. In the meantime, we have a couple of rules for this newsgroup that we'd like to share with you: 1. WE WILL BE POSTING ONLY MESSAGES ABOUT ACTUAL APPLICATIONS, EITHER EXISTING OR IN THE WORKS (TO THE BEST OF OUR INFORMATION). Items about other issues (philosophy, media treatment of virtual worlds, and all manner of speculations about the future impact of this technology, in a general sense) should continue to be sent to sci.virtual-worlds. 2. When you post, please try to keep your messages tidy (lines of fewer than 70 characters in length) and relevant. If you're responding to another person's post, please be sure that the prior post is identified somewhere in your message. Also, although it's not required, do try to get your spelling correct and keep messages short: misspellings and messages over two pages in length will greatly diminish your readers. (This has been proven!) Professor Greg Newby of the University of Illinois will continue his mailing list service for those of you who cannot access the USENET. If you have problems with the mailing list, please send a message to Greg (gbnewby@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu); we cannot help you in this regard. Our host for sci.virtual-worlds.apps is the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. (Mycket tack!) If you want to send a message directly via email, perhaps because your USENET access is restricted, you may send it to virtual@kth.se You can also fax news to Bob Jacobson at +1-206-781-5254. (Keep it succinct -- short!) We will also have an administrative address that you can reach by email for non-posting messages. And, eventually, we will have an applications FAQ to rival the one that exists for sci.virtual-worlds AND an archive for publishable papers. (Mark is updating the s.v-w FAQ, all the same.) Thanks for your patience in awaiting the arrival of sci.virtual-worlds.apps. It's our pleasure to bring this important and timely newsgroup to you. Please feel free to send us your comments and suggestions as you think of them. Like its forebearer, sci.virtual-worlds, sci.virtual-worlds.apps is YOUR newsgroup and its quality will be what YOU make it. Again, welcome to sci.virtual- worlds.apps! Sincerely, Bob Jacobson Mark DeLoura Principal Co-Moderator Principal Co-Moderator bluefire@well.sf.ca.us deloura@cs.unc.edu (President, (Graduate Student, Computer Science, WORLDESIGN, Inc., Seattle) Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)