Conferencing, however it is implemented, requires some form of active
notification of interested participants when something has changed so
they can avoid repeated polling of servers to find out. Email works
fine for this purpose until the number of participants gets large
enough to justify flooded distribution to the world as in nntp news.
WWW based conferencing is interesting because it may use multimedia, and
because it is built around the archive rather than building the archive
after the fact.
Daniel LaLiberte (liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~liberte/