Serious chat in a university setting

[Nick Arnett]

At 01:45 PM 11/7/97 -0800, Prentiss Riddle wrote:

>I'm investigating online chat with the possibility of supporting it
>here at Rice.  The history is that we have never supported chat before
>because of a lack of faculty interest, because the models we'd seen
>were all recreational in nature, and because known chat implementations
>(IRC, MUDs) were resource-intensive and/or insecure.  Now we have some
>faculty interest and it's time to revisit the issue.

I've been looking at chat lately, trying to figure out if there's a general
need for chat that is associated with on-line resources.  We think there
might be a call for threaded commentary on the resources that we index and
organize.  I'd be curious if you or others see a need for this.  On-line
services have often had at least a loose correspondence between discussion
and file libraries, which led us in this direction.

Nick

Product Manager, Knowledge Applications
Verity Inc. -- Connecting People with Information

Phone: 408-542-2164               Fax: 408-541-1600
Home office: 408-733-7613         narnett at verity.com
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