I just took the plunge and started up an email list for science hobbyists:
SCICLUB-LIST@ESKIMO.COM. Feel free to check it out. The message traffic
is nearly zero, since I just started announcing it this week.
I have yet to encounter any good general-experimentation lists for
amateurs, and I've found that the SAS/WebX forum and the newsgroup
alt.amateur.science don't offer quite the same thing as an e-list.
(...and I *still* miss that old email forum of long ago that the SAS was
running!)
If you know of others who would be interested in this, feel free to
pass this along. The more the merrier. I think the physics types are
finding out about it, so what we need are people in bio, chem, etc.
Sciclub-list will be run in "unmoderated" mode, but with a set of rules
and a moderator (me) to make them stick. See the above website for the
proposed rules. I intend that the group will be appropriate for families
(no instructions for extremely hazardous experiments.) No "weird"
science. As long as we stick to orthodox topics, the "believers" and
"skeptics" can coexist peacefully.
Sciclub-list will have no official connection with the Society for Amateur
Scientists, although I hope that plenty of SAS people will want to hop on
board. :)
Since the group is new, I can't predict if the messages/day will grow
intolerably large. If you'd only like to receive collected messages every
few days, rather than a constant dribble of messages in realtime,
"sciclub-digest" is alternative to "sciclub-list." If you'd rather just
check out the messages every week or so, I'll also keep an archive of the
current month's messages on the website above.