Fair point. At Sal’s level, you’re right, it’s broadcasting. But there aren’t many at that level. For the rest of us, communication can scale, albeit imperfectly.

It’s like saying that having 60’000 friends on facebook is scaling friendship by a factor of about 10’000. – Those are friends, I mean real friends?

http://historichomeworks.com/forum/index.php

So, I can refer similar queries to that response. In this way “narrow-cast” becomes “broadcast.” They are often viewed by 10 or 100 more people than my original correspondent. Often the response develops into a full discussion that is viewed by tens of thousands of people.

My forum system gives me a count of viewers. Here’s an example:
http://historichomeworks.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=16
You will see one near the top with 90,000 viewers, some with thousands of viewers and some with hundreds.

When I see a discussion drifting up into the tens of thousands I select it to edit and add to my original response at the top of the discussion by summarizing the discussion beneath, and adding more recent material. As this body of text develops I add illustrations in form of photos, sketches and videos.

Here is an example on removing paint with steam (92,000 views):
http://historichomeworks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=133

and another on glazing windows with putty (32,000 views):
http://historichomeworks.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=955

When a topic has matured and has between 50,000 and 100,000 views I published in my little series of booklets and books:

http://www.historichomeworks.com/hhw/reports/reports.htm

I might add it to an existing title (which I publish with Print On Demand services and can easily update), or create a new title.

This bumps the readership of my response to that original query up into the hundreds of thousands.

This approach is definitely saving me keystrokes. And, helping a lot of people along the way, too.

John
by hammer and hand great works do stand
by pen and thought best words are wrought

I would say that the point is to practice what in another context is called open notebook science.

As, by the way, you are doing very effectively at http://zvolkov.com/blog/.