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This article is from the Internet Writer Resource Guide FAQ, by Trevor Lawrence trevor@bel.avonibp.co.uk with numerous contributions by others.

7) The FAQ as the Future (Internet Writer Resource Guide)

(By L. Detweiler)

An interesting form of cyberspatial writing has existed for essentially
as long as Usenet and continues to gain momentum and prestige, and may
be the bridge to the vision of the future I have written about above.
The Frequently Asked Question List, or FAQ, a document designed to
answer questions that pop up on newsgroups to decrease the annoyance
factor in reading them, started out as not even something that was ever
archived at a public site-- FAQs were just regularly posted by their
authors. (A regular Usenet posting itself represents different kind of
publishing that is unique to cyberspace-- somewhat reminiscent of the
way an electron beam of a television set displays a picture by
continually retracing it.) But FAQs have evolved into extremely
sophisticated collections of information on virtually any subject,
becoming highly refined over many years and involving whole
hierarchies of teams and editors. A FAQ is even superior to many other
types of static collections of writing in this way-- they are far more
valuable (but also sometimes more difficult to keep track of) because
they are continually updated.

The most important new development in FAQ writing is that of the
`commercial factor'. Buried in that phrase are many multifaceted pots of
gold, but also many bugaboos. Very soon, the Internet will have a
standard for mercantile commerce, and some FAQs will be one of the first
pieces of the pie to be commercialized. I foresee some great, wrenching
upheavals in the FAQ structures as the forces of `volunteerism' and
`entrepreneurialism' meet face to face. I believe that a certain
percentage of all FAQs, which in many ways are a microcosm of the
Internet, will remain free and maintained by volunteers. But the rewards
to both writers and readers in a fee-based structure for access are
great. For even extremely inconsequential fees to individual readers,
writers could be compensated, rewarded, and encouraged in their writing
quite tangibly. And I believe a commensurate increase in the quality of
the FAQs written by them, for their `consumers', will be quite dramatic.
The FAQ will continue to be at the forefront of cyberspatial writing
frontiers.

I encourage you to read about the CRAM service below involved
`publishing' the collections of others into the FAQ infrastructure. This
removes some of the bothersome overhead to the writer in disseminating
their writing by having an `agent' take care of the details. CRAM has
propagated over a half-dozen different compilations into the FAQ
structure with extremely rewarding benefits to everyone involved. The
writers are quite delighted at the increased exposure and the readers
are quite delighted at running into the quality compilations they might
never have discovered otherwise.

I also urge anyone interested in cyberspatial writing to read the
news.answers FAQ posted to that group and write a FAQ on their favorite
subject of interest if it is not already covered. Even the simple
process of taking existing FAQs and reorganizing them into more useful
collections of information is an extremely valuable service to the net.
Writing a FAQ in many ways is one of the ultimate community services to
your fellow cyberspatial citizens. Just browsing the rtfm.mit.edu
archives is an extremely pleasureable activity.

The FAQ is a beautiful model of the future of writing in cyberspace. As
it exists, the current process on Usenet to submit an `official' FAQ is
far from Herculean and in fact highly accessable to virtually anyone
with a modicum of interest in writing. In fact, the effort is
astonishingly less than that required for that of say, a book, but, with
newsgroup distributions reaching tens of thousands of readers, amazingly
the exposure in many cases can be *greater* than that of a published
book. And this exposure will increase tremendously as cyberspace becomes
more ubiquitous, and I am convinced the `entrance requirements' will
also become even more trivial to pass such that, as I wrote above,
virtually anyone who can write can publish. Even the necessity of owning
a computer is bypassed!

 

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• prev: 6) A Vision of the Future (Internet Writer Resource Guide)
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• next: 8) WWW: Cyberspatial Presses (Internet Writer Resource Guide)

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