14th Apr 2003
Nostalgic for Usenet, looking for UseWeb
I’m nostalgic today, thinking of the days when Usenet was one of two
major means for having an ongoing discussion on some given topic (the
other one would be email lists) It seems to me that good information
is now spread all over the place. If you want to research something
like CSS, you might check a few web sites for articles, check a few
online forums, possibly join an email list, and search through
deja.com for news postings.
Whew! It used to be a lot simpler :-)
This is my picture of things, at least for this morning:
- Usenet - communities organized around a shared interest
- Email - snapshot communities of two or more, often based on an event
- Email Lists - ongoing communities organized around a collection of
email addresses, sharing a common, often very specific interest - Bulletin Boards / Forums - communities organized around a web site,
distinct from communities about the same subject on some other web
site (but may have many of the same members) - Blogs - loose communities organized around finding links by searching,
the serendipity of following links from a site you trust. “word of link”
The thing that hits me is this: there are more places than ever to
search to find good info. Usenet had, and still has, the uncanny
ability to provide for focused discussions based on geography and/or
interests. I would love to see some sort of intersection of blogs and
Usenet, where blog postings seamlessly call into newsgroup
postings/threads, and vice versa.
I wish someone would tell me that it’s already been done. I’m
thinking it hasn’t happened. I am almost at the point where I could
draw a storyboard for how virtual newsgroups, keyword searching,
blogrolls, archived blog entries, and so on, would all fit together.
p.s. yes, I bet there are some Ivory Tower projects along these lines.
Where are the storyboards? Where are the mockups?
