Well, Nikon Mike has retired to rest his tired fingers (although I'll try to get him to answer the few remaining questions that slipped in after the "bell"), and it's time to digest the exercise: How'd you like it? Other than better planning around Mike's frenetic travel schedule (meaning quicker responses early in the process), any thoughts for how it might be improved? Would you like to see similar things done with other manufacturers? (We have a lot of contacts we could exercise if people think this sort of thing is worthwhile.)

Any thoughts about how this stacks up against other web-based communications? (I'm thinking of "chat" sessions, which I've found terminally frustrating in the past, due to the bottleneck of one person trying to manage conversations with 400 others. - But then I may just be a chat curmudgeon.)

Did you like Mike's answers? Have a bone to pick? Enter comments here, I'll forward them to him.

Comments & feedback eagerly solicited! Thanks for everyone's participation!

(Added 3/24, 1:00pm EST) - Apologies! - Didn't realize the colored title I'd edited-in for this thread was causing problems for people trying to leave messages! - It's fixed now, all comments welcomed! (Thanks, Francie and Gerry for the heads-up note!)

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), March 23, 2000

Answers

I thought this was great!! I would love to see you do this with other reps of other companies (howz about Olympus!!?)

I've never tried the chat question sessions, but this way of doing it seemed organized, easy...at my leisure I could go through and absorb the questions and answers, and even add a question to get more clarification on an answer. Did you follow that??? Anyway, I really enjoyed this and hope you do it again. Everyone gets to participate and all questions got answered.

-- Francie Bacon (Francie_Bacon@troweprice.com), March 24, 2000.

Dave, I thought this worked very well. I liked the fact that other people asked some of the questions I would have asked so I could go and read the response that Mike had for those folks as well as my own question. I do think that Mike is a very loyal employee of Nikon and that shows through in some, if not all, of his responses - but then should we expect less?

It is often very difficult to associate a large faceless organization like Nikon (or Sony, or Kodak, etc.) with an individual. Nikon Canada does not even give you a generic email address on their websight. At least Mike has put a face to Nikon Inc. (USA) - maybe he will become the Lee Iococa of digital imaging.

More like this would be great.

-- Gerry Parrott (gerry.parrott@home.com), March 24, 2000.

I thought it worked extremely well, and provided a wonderful opportunity for all of us to get answers to questions in a timely and accurate fashion. The problem with a lot of forums now-a-days is they become rumor mills or soap boxes for people looking to further their point of view. Having Mike directly respond to questions, recognizing there are many things he's not at liberty to say, makes for a very useful information source. You should not only continue the service, but perhaps even sort the questions and responses into categories thereby making it easier to track down answers to questions. Keep up the good work, and give our thanks to Mike. I can't wait to get my CP990.

-- John Triebe (jtriebe@mindspring.com), March 24, 2000.

An interesting concept. As a person who has had to moderate more online guest chat sessions than I would care to remember I think this might have possibilities. But... it would be far more useful if the questions and replies were compiled into a single document, sort of like the log of the chat session, and made available. Or, in the alternative, at least index the questions in a contiquous order so that they may be selected and the answers viewed without having to wade through the entire forum index.

-- Bill Cook (billc@wcook.com), March 24, 2000.

Yes, the chat was very useful, but a different answer/question organisation scheme would be helpful. As was mentioned, the questions and answers should be comiled into a single location somehow, and it should be easier to spot when an new answer is given. Also, if a second answer was given to the same thread (in case of on-going discussion), it's not easy to spot without reading through every message every day.

-- M.Davis (M@r-i-l.net), March 24, 2000.

Thanks for the suggestions! We're looking at some new forum software solutions, so your comments on organization, etc are particularly pertinent right now. One of the things we'll look for in any new software is an easy way to spawn separate discussion topics like this, to keep all the relevant traffic segregated from all the other stuff that's going on. Vis a vis the issue of finding new posts, the "New Answers" link at the top of the main forum page gives you a list of posts with new answers, sorted by date. This makes it easy to see if there are any new posts to the questions you're interested in.

Thanks again for the feedback, keep it coming!

-- Dave Etchells (detchells@imaging-resource.com), March 24, 2000.

Dave, you may want to check these folks out. I think it will do everything you are looking for. It has a great feature that allows you to look at the posts over the last day, week, etc and it also allows the user to set up new thread groupings (like the old DOS file tree)

http://www.ultimatebb.com/index.shtml

-- Gerry Parrott (gerry.parrott@home.com), March 24, 2000.