The Bars of Usenet and Blogistan
Doc Searls quotes Don Marti to the effect that "The distributed online forum called ’blogs’ is slowly reinventing all the features that the distributed online forum called ’Usenet’ invented 20 years ago. Who will reinvent ’kill thread’ for the RSS aggregator?"
The correspondence between Usenet and Blogistan is not exact. I believe that Usenet fostered a sense of community and conversation much better than Blogistan does, and for one reason: for any given topic, there was generally one "location" where discussion of that topic was appropriate, or at most, a few. You wanted to talk about shortwave radio, you posted in rec.radio.shortwave. You wanted to talk about the travails of being single in the late 1980s, you posted to soc.singles. Blogistan, on the other hand, is far more fragmented. The watering hole of Usenet is now a million different bars, and getting a drink in one doesn’t mean someone getting a drink in another is going to hear what you have to say. Most bars have only a few patrons. Tools like trackback and Technorati and RSS keyword searches are patches on the system to try and recreate that singularity of location, but they don’t work well, and with Blogistan’s tendency to expand like the universe in the wake of the Big Bang resulting in ever increasing fragmentation, they may never work as well as the simple classification scheme of Usenet. And I say Blogistan, but I really believe that this fragmentation is an endemic characteristic of the web as a whole. The web combines the worst aspects of fragmentation and asynchronicity to make for a terrible combination when it comes to community building.
I wrote a long post a few months ago about how well or poorly different Internet protocols/tools were suited for community building and making friends. Since I’m well out on the edge of the "long tail", nobody noticed. I used to write such posts more often, but now, not so much; the nature of Blogistan ensures that the "conversation" is taking place somewhere else if it’s happening at all. On Usenet, people would have seen the post, and it would actually have been part of a conversation. It makes more sense for me to write in this medium for my mom; I know she’ll see it if I post it here. (Sorry, Mom, this one isn’t for you.)
I miss Usenet as it existed in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I made a lot of friends there, some of whom I’m still friends with today. I met my wife there. When the spammers showed up and poisoned the well, I felt a real loss. I think of the newsgroups I used to frequent almost 20 years ago the way my mom thinks of the house in Detroit she grew up in that decayed over the decades (after her family left, of course) to the point of becoming a crack house before being burnt to the ground.
With all the discussion about A-listers as the new gatekeepers and such, Doc mentioned that one way he finds articles on sites he doesn’t frequent is by subscribing in an RSS aggregator to keyword searches on his name, among other topics of interest. So, hi, Doc. It’s not much of a system if one of the best ways to get noticed is to mention an A lister by name. And especially since Doc mentioned this, it seems like the incentive is now there to game the system and get attention by mentioning A-listers like Doc the way I do here, or popular keywords for that matter. No doubt the spammers are already beavering away, and those keyword searches will become less and less useful. That’s one area where the correspondence between Usenet and Blogistan is approaching 1:1.
(Later: there’s a followup to this post in the next post.)
Posted at 10:15 PM
Oy. I feel the need to wander through the comments on my old posts, to remind me why this used to be fun.
As long as I can avoid posts where I was sucking up to an A-lister, which I fear I probably did too often.
Posted by Phil Ringnalda at 11:19 PM, February 16, 2006 [Link]