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T A B L E__T A L K Coding gone sour? Modem got you down? Software gone berserk? Get advice for your technical woes in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Is cyberpunk still breathing? Let's Get This Straight The Richard Stallman saga, redux Let's Get This Straight Death and the hard drive - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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A kinder, gentler Usenet
Will putting a friendly face on the Internet's wilderness of newsgroups improve them -- or tame them?
BY JANELLE BROWN | Imagine the world's largest community -- a place where millions of people converse daily in civilized tones about everything from cereal to Camus. A place free of spam, porn, come-ons and flame wars. A place, in fact, where your thoughtful ruminations might actually be rewarded with prizes. Is this some new, gated online space requiring an annual membership fee? Nope -- it's the new vision some entrepreneurs have for Usenet, the Net's oldest and most anarchic interactive zone. The last year has seen a burst of products designed to tame Usenet into a consumer-friendly product: from the explosive growth of pioneer Deja News to more recent products like Talkway and Realize. These Web-based commercial services are implementing everything from personalization to collaborative filtering to make Usenet a warm, friendly place where novices will want to participate. As Talkway founder Richard Simoni puts it: "We want to make Usenet really accessible and really approachable: We don't want it to be a techie haven where nerds like me can talk about their little nerd interests. We want it to be an actual consumer product." Usenet was founded in 1979 as a bulletin board system for Unix programmers; today, by one count, there are at least 65,000 newsgroups, last month alone hosting nearly 10 million posts by 1.2 million people. Though technically Usenet exists as a sort of parallel network, socially it is the backbone of the Internet -- the most rudimentary yet inherently interactive community. Yet for years people have been talking about its demise. It may be huge, but it's also a garbage-filled and abstruse system that hasn't changed much since its inception, and it certainly hasn't grown as fast as its baby sibling, the Web. Consider the hurdles that newsgroup neophytes have to overcome: Until recently, reading Usenet meant downloading a client program, configuring it to communicate with one of the "news servers" that handles Usenet traffic and deciphering a mire of directories before eventually stumbling across a newsgroup that was both relevant to your interests and trafficked by humans. Then, of course, you would have to wade through the spam, flame wars and pornographic solicitations. Compare that to the relevance and ease of joining, say, a moderated forum on CNN.com, and it's no surprise that people have been predicting Usenet's death. "My overall view on this is that Usenet, the newsgroups, never really evolved out of the old Internet interfaces," says Eric Horvitz, who is researching Usenet at Microsoft. "It's this arcane world still that's not really friendly to a majority of consumers. It's like the ham radio users, the CB users of the Internet." But the new Usenet companies are convinced that Usenet can be saved from ham radio's fate. Since Usenet is a system without owners or real authorities, it's not likely that the infrastructure is going to change any time soon; but they believe that a commercial interface might be the key to morphing Usenet from niche market to mass market. N E X T_ P A G E .|. Profits and loss -- can Usenet's character survive commercialization? |