From dmeadows@idirect.com Sun Jan 30 07:52:20 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id HAA26964 for ; Sun, 30 Jan 2000 07:52:20 -0800 Received: from deimos.idirect.com (deimos.idirect.com [207.136.80.182]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id HAA17525 for ; Sun, 30 Jan 2000 07:52:19 -0800 Received: from default (on-ham-a53-01-56.idirect.com [216.154.51.56]) by deimos.idirect.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA74231; Sun, 30 Jan 2000 10:50:44 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <4.3.0.33.0.20000130102607.00ad8e20@idirect.com> X-Sender: dmeadows@idirect.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.0.33 (Beta) Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2000 10:50:28 -0500 To: latin@topica.com, classics@u.washington.edu, ane@oi.uchicago.edu, ANCIEN-L@listserv.louisville.edu From: David Meadows Subject: Promoting the Ancient World Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed .... with apologies for cross-postings One of the things which Classicists and others with an interest in the ancient world are often concerned with is the idea of outreach, of making what we do more accessible (and generally more know) to the outside world. At the same time, it is clear that an awful lot of what we are doing (in terms of conferences, jobs, websites, etc.) is not being made aware to those of us in the profession. To a large extent, email groups such as this (these?) held the promise of doing both of these tasks, but as anyone who has been around the lists long enough knows, there are often (too often?) days when one just can't get the desire up to wade through the mountains of discussions (et alia) to get to the useful information. Accordingly, I am embarking upon a project which is designed to increase the visibility of what we are doing to the public at large and facilitate communication amongst ourselves. In the course of the next couple of weeks, I shall be setting up a Desktop News channel which will be associated with my Atrium website. Desktop News makes use of 'push technology' to deliver a ticker of news items to your desktop -- it requires some software which is rather easy to set up (currently only available for windows, I'm afraid) and allows you to select which channels of various content you want to receive via that ticker. The ticker presents things in headline form, and clicking on a headline will take you to a website with more information. You can configure it to be always on your desktop and updating in 'real time' or you can simply have it come up and update on demand. In terms of raising the visibility of what we do, Desktop News provides us with an interesting possibility of having 'our news' existing on a major service alongside the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and various other content providers. At this point I'm proposing an 'Atrium Channel' which would consist of the following 'subchannels' (each of the following would be a separate subscription): 1. Media -- this would be early feeds of the news articles which currently appear in my Explorator newsletter (archaeology and news of the ancient world ... the newsletter itself would then become a weekly thing, which it pretty much is now); there would also be reminders of television programming on in the next 24 hours gleaned from my tv listings 2. Professional Development -- these would include job announcements, calls for papers, conferences, dig opportunities, fellowships, etc. (culled from the lists, but hopefully parties concerned will send them directly to me) 3. Varia -- the catchall channel, which would include announcements of significant new websites, updates to current major websites, and any other announcements which might seem appropriate. I'm hoping I can convince publishers of journals to notify me (with t.o.c.'s or links thereto) of new issues (ditto publishers of monographs). That said, I am currently working out the final technical details of this (I'm currently thinking of having channels which would be updated once or twice a day), but would really appreciate comments on the above and/or suggestions of channels which might be of interest (perhaps, e.g., it would be better to split the professional development channel into one for jobs and fellowships and another for conference-related things?). I'd also be interested in hearing from representatives of organizations who might be interested in filtering announcements of their activities through the proposed channels. Discussion onlist might be useful, but otherwise please drop me a line at: dmeadows@idirect.com ]|[David Meadows]|[http://web.idirect.com/~atrium]|[Rogue Classicist]|[ .