But on a private NNTP server, it's a different story. Suddenly it makes sense to create links to these permanent news messages. I'm delighted to report that, with Communicator's Collabra client, which just shipped, you can achieve this result by dragging a message icon into the message-composition window. It means that the number and quality of documents that you've collected in a newsgroup are not the only measures of its value. Density of interconnection becomes another key measure.
References can be a concise and el egant alternative to quoting huge chunks of prior messages.
Even more ambitious, messages with links to messages can summarize discussions and create alternate views of databases. It's true that these meta-messages are still part of the flow of the newsgroup. Like all messages, they'll be seen once and then fade into the archive. But if they're composed in HTML, they can also function as Web pages. Think of an HTML-based NNTP discussion as a bunch of rough drafts, some of which will merit promotion to the status of finished Web pages.