West-Midwood-OnLine
February 16, 2014 Since
December 2008 West Midwood has maintained its own electronic
discussion group, sometimes referred to by the geeky term ListServ,
generating an average of 20 new topics a month with participation by
over 150 different email addresses.
The
benefit of this group communication has been evident over the years:
it is a quick way to alert neighbors to upcoming local events, to get
word out about crime in the area, to post occasional ads about one's
home business or unwanted home furnishings for sale and to discuss
all sorts of issues ranging from animal life (stray cats, wild dogs,
opossum and raccoon sightings) to garbage collection, suspicious
door-to-door solicitations, nasty weather, contractors and subway
schedules, to name but a few of the topics. To date, there have no
postings about Bigfoot or space aliens coming up out of the freight
train cut, so we can all be thankful for that.
If
you are new to the community or have not yet joined, there is no cost
and all you need is Internet access. Simply send an email to
JoeAtEnrightdotcom
who will then add your email address(es) to the group, usually within
24 hours (this “human gate-keeping” has successfully prevented
spam and con artists from sneaking in to our group). Thereafter, the
subscriber can send emails to the group at
west-midwood-online@googlegroups.com
and
will automatically
receive
a copy of every email sent by any other resident/subscriber to that
same group address. All of this happens in real time. The
guidelines for posting are simple: no course language, be civil, no political or religious discussion and
keep it local as much as possible, which pretty much rules out
discussions about rodeo riding in Montana.
Also,
there is no prohibition against adding multiple email accounts (work
and home emails for instance). Some residents use one address to
subscribe only to the group so they can participate in real time
email exchanges and add a second address to receive a daily digest –
the digest is a single email that is generated each day containing
all of the previous day's postings. Again, just send an email request
to JoeAtEnrightdotcom.
A
note about privacy: any member of the group with a Google email
account can navigate to
http://groups.google.com/group/west-midwood-online
and peruse/search the archive of prior postings arranged in
chronological order. But rest assured, none of the postings or
discussions in our group can be retrieved on the Internet unless
you are a member. So what gets discussed in West Midwood, stays in
West Midwood.
For
those of you who also want to be advised of events throughout the
Victorian Flatbush area, you can subscribe to Flatbush Development
Corporation's group discussion list by sending an email to
fdconline-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
The
FDC also maintains a classified advertisement email exchange which
you can join by simply sending an email to
fdconline_classifieds-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
You can also follow FDC's tweets at https://twitter.com/FDConline.
Finally,
the best daily coverage of our area cab be found on the Ditmas Park
Corner Blog, which is managed by West Midwood resident Mary Bakija.
