Why is it necessary to "tag" on-topic news cites?

[jc dill]

Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> I'm aware of quite a few people who have encouraged said poster to tag his 
> off-topic posts for easy filtering, myself included.
A brief cite and quote from a news article discussing the status of 
major networks (BellSouth Corp., SBC Communications, Cingular Wireless) 
in North America following a huge storm that affected several states is 
clearly on-topic for the North American Network Operators Group 
discussion list.

> Ideally this material 
> belongs in a blog with a comments section,
He has a blog.  He posts *many* more links to his blog each day than he 
posts to nanog.  Since creating his blog, the links he posts to nanog 
are, for the most part, on-topic for nanog.  Certainly the post that 
triggered this discussion was on-topic for nanog.

> or in a seperate mailing list. 
> Failing that, it needs to be tagged for easy filtering by those who aren't 
> interested.
I'm confused.  Can you explain why the ON-TOPIC links he posts somehow 
"need to be tagged"?

> Adding a subject tag 
> also allows readers to match on the off-topic chatter spawned by these 
> posts, not just the original post.
Why is this any different from the off-topic chatter spawned from other 
posts?

jc