Subject: frightening (?) development about usenet archives
Curtiss Priest (cpriest@juno.com)
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:55:39 EDT
To: bloom@averstar.com, c.musselman@rcn.com, kolson@helios.acomp.usf.edu, gwilson@juno.com, CMERCIER@VMSVAX.SIMMONS.EDU, cpriest@juno.com, Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:55:39 EDT Subject: frightening (?) development about usenet archives Message-Id: <20001026.145541.7991.7.cpriest@juno.com> From: Curtiss Priest <cpriest@juno.com>
About 4 months ago deja.com took the 1996-1999
archives off line. An e-mail asking about this assured
me that they would be back.
I recently told Microsoft (in a Boston Focus Group) that
deja.com was superior to the Microsoft "Knowledge Base"
in solving Microsoft software problems.
And if you are working with a school to solve Windows 3.1 problems, you
want the earlier postings, too.
And where else can you "publish" technical notes in a forum where
others will find useful information. Whenever I run into a problem which
has
not be addressed on usenet, I publish a note about the solution --
as my contribution to all the useful tips I've gotten from
the site. Deja.com is first in my bookmarks, ahead of Altavista
and some 600 other sites of interest to me.
Wondering if they were having trouble supporting the site,
I sent e-mail 6 months back that I would certainly pay
$10/yr. for access, and figured that 100's of thousands of
other deja.com users would too.
Now we have this story from Wired News and I have also
attached a tribute to usenet written by our very savy
computer commentator of the Boston Globe, Hiawatha Bray
Sincerely,
Curtiss Priest
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 13:45:27 -0400
From: Andy Carvin <acarvin@benton.org>
To: "Digitaldivide (E-mail)" <digitaldivide@list.benton.org>
Subject: Usenet Sale: Sounds to Silence? (fwd)
Message-ID: <377AFDDED85BD3118095009027A8F38DB2D1BF@wx5.benton.org>
Reposted with permission from Wired News... -ac
Usenet Sale: Sounds to Silence?
by Chris Oakes
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39622,00.html
2:00 a.m. Oct. 25, 2000 PDT
It's a massive database stuffed with reams of human
conversation that is rummaged daily by Internet users
worldwide. It's loaded with 500 million postings in
35,000 discussion forums. In five years, its digital
waist-size has ballooned to over 1.5 terabytes -- or
1,500 gigabytes.
It is the Usenet archive of Deja.com -- and its fate is
now in question because it is about to be sold.
More to the point, a change in fortune for the biggest
Usenet archive on the Net raises the question: Does the
archive have a secure future?
Deja officials confirmed a report published last week
that the New York company is seeking a merger for its
e-commerce-focused Precision Buying Service.
Separately, the company has already reached a deal in
principle for the sale of the Usenet half of its service.
A company official speaking on condition of anonymity
confirmed the sale, but would not name the buyer of
the archive or the price.
The Deja archive is by far the largest record of Usenet
-- a 5-year-old collection of newsgroup discussions
taking place through Usenet's worldwide
communications network.
To check out the latest buzz on anything from Thai
recipes to sex to urban legends, Net users can search
Deja's archive and trawl discussions dating back to
1995.
Usenet experts, pioneer users -- as well as business
executives who've tried to build businesses around
online discussion -- think the 5-year-old record of
Usenet still means a great deal to the Internet.
"I don't think it's lost its value," said Ariel Poler, CEO
and co-founder of Topica.
Topica provides a discussion archive of its own, storing
the content of e-mail-based discussion lists. Topica
users can browse and search the contents of e-mail lists
using a Web interface -- just as Deja has done with
Usenet discussions.
Poler thinks Usenet may yet harbor an untapped,
Web-like potential for a new information business
model.
Not yet, though. The Deja sale underscores the fact that
no Net company seems to be able to successfully
exploit the odd animal of Usenet.
"I still find good information there," Poler said. "I think
it's a real shame that these companies ... such as Deja
.... are not going to be doing it much longer."
Usenet was, in a sense, the Net before the Net. Special
"store-and-forward" protocols enabled Usenet's unique
form of conversation and collaboration to take place
over connected Unix computers, whether those
connections were full-time or not.
"Usenet is kind of special," said Richard Sexton, a
pioneering user and newsgroup founder in the network's
early days. "It's actually a protocol -- a fundamental
(network) service, like e-mail and the Internet... . It's
an institution."
Before the dawn of the commercial Internet in 1994,
Usenet's reach was greater than the Internet itself, he
said. But in its earliest years, access to Usenet required
"Level 5 geek clearance," Sexton said. "The same
people that could get a feed also could get marijuana."
For excited early adopters like Sexton, Usenet turned
the directness of one-to-one e-mail into a potent forum
for so-called "many-to-many" communications.
If Napster highlights the immense appeal of computers
sharing files, the explosive growth of Usenet was its
precursor -- a harbinger showing what people could do
when they could share knowledge and opinions from
computer to computer.
Deja.com gave Usenet a Web interface in 1995 and
archived every Usenet discussion thread from that year
forward. The name of the service, originally Deja News,
changed when Deja re-launched itself as a
product-shopping service last year, pushing the Usenet
service to the back burner.
The company withdrew plans for an initial public offering
earlier this year, and in September, cut back its
140-member staff by over a third -- a cash-saving
precursor to the pending sale.
According to a company executive, the new owner will
make the Usenet archive freely available, possibly
under the same Deja name.
That is in contrast to another, far smaller Usenet
archiving service, Remarq. That company, purchased
earlier this year by Critical Path, has converted its
much-smaller Usenet archive to a pay-for service aimed
at corporate networks.
Poler said Topica has previously been in discussions
with Deja about the archive but is not the pending
buyer. He did say, however, that he wishes Topica had
the resources to archive Usenet, in addition to e-mail
lists.
"We don't (archive Usenet postings) because we find
that there's better information in the e-mail lists, and
there's still a lot that we need to do in that space,"
Poler said. "We want to remain focused."
But does the uniqueness of Usenet necessarily mean
that it becomes more valuable when archived?
"A lot of the stuff is of wide interest only as current
traffic," said pioneering Usenet archivist Henry Spencer.
While at the University of Toronto, Spencer archived
much of the content of Usenet from the early 1980s to
the early 1990s. He and his collaborators, who stored
the data on tape-based storage systems, dropped the
project as it became too unwieldy and time consuming.
"The interest (in Usenet content) falls off very quickly
with time as you start going back into it," Spencer said.
"So it's difficult to justify putting significant amounts of
money into preserving the old stuff that hardly anybody
-- except maybe the few enthusiastic historians -- ever
looks at."
Newsgroups have also had their share of problems.
Over the years, spam overran many discussion groups.
In a reaction to that problem and a perceived
breakdown in the topical hierarchy of Usenet, Sexton
and other Usenet enthusiasts attempted to begin anew.
They founded a brand-new hierarchy of topics in
something they called Usenet II.
Deja's archive experienced its own controversies along
the way. The presence of users' own words and ideas
stored in a commercial archive have raised various
copyright concerns.
The company has always contended that there is no
violation of copyright, and the bulk of Usenet
enthusiasts primarily support the archive as a valuable
resource. But users like Sexton can't help but note that
it is his and many others' words changing hands with
the sale of the archive.
The Deja executive insisted the Usenet service remains
a profitable business. The new owner will be better
equipped to grow the service in the context of a larger
information service, he said.
Deja has presented several ideas to its next owner on
how the archive could be made into a bigger business,
mainly by rolling the content into the resources and
services of a larger information service.
Yet Deja's own transformation into a
commerce-oriented business in May 1999 made its own
statement about the viability of a service built around
Usenet archiving. The Deja executive said the move
was not abandoning the Usenet side of the business,
but simply attempting to expand on it.
Wherever the archive finds itself down the road, Usenet
enthusiasts don't want to see it die.
If it doesn't become a commercial success, archivist
Spencer could imagine a university communications
department taking up stewardship.
"It's a real shame to see that stuff go," Spencer said.
"Not because it's of immense, immediate practical
value, but because I think in some areas it sheds a fair
bit of light on how some of this culture developed -- the
cultural history of computer networking.
"A lot of it is already gone for good. The more of it we
can preserve the better."
Copyright 1994-2000 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.
*****************************************
Andy Carvin andy@benton.org
Senior Associate
Benton Foundation
http://edweb.gsn.org/andy
http://www.DigitalDivideNetwork.org
*****************************************
The following article is
provided under Fair Use, Section 107, Chapter 17, U.S. Code
at the "teachable moment" for comment and/or criticism
UPGRADE What's Usenet without use?
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Columnist, 1/20/1999
Every Internet entrepreneur worth his first $5 million in venture
capital says he's building an ''on-line community,'' an electronic
hangout for millions of loyal Internet users. Meanwhile, the original
Net community, Usenet, is being ignored by millions who might profit
from the occasional visit.
Usenet is one of the wonders of the Internet. It's a system of
thousands of bulletin boards, called newsgroups, where people can ask
and answer questions. Each focuses on a single topic - for instance,
rec.arts.tv.soaps is the group for discussions about soap operas.
When I recently had trouble with the CD-ROM drive on an old computer
I'm refurbishing, I posted a question on comp.sys.ibm.pc
..hardware.cd-rom. A day later, a guy wrote back with the solution to
my problem. Some people think I know computers; what I really know is
how to ask questions on Usenet.
A couple of years ago, Usenet junkies loved to gripe about the foolish
messages posted by Internet newcomers, especially visitors from
America Online. It seems they needn't have worried. According to
Internet service providers, most newcomers to the Net want no part of
Usenet.
So says Ritch Blasi, a spokesman for AT&T Worldnet, which connects 1.8
million households to the Internet. Blasi told me only 15 percent of
Worldnet's subscribers log on to Usenet. ''I was actually kind of
surprised,'' Blasi said.
It also came as a rude shock to Fabrice Hamaide. He's president of
Talkway Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that originally specialized in
offering Web-based access to the Usenet. Hamaide tells me that Talkway
has had to abandon its original business model because hardly anyone
actually wants Usenet access. Hamaide has learned to his sorrow that
''most people who get their first computer or first Internet access
don't even know that Usenet exists.''
This is a new chapter in an old Internet story. A number of
once-popular on-line services have passed away or waned in popularity,
as newcomers, and even Net veterans, embrace simpler alternatives.
Nobody uses Gopher to find information anymore. It was a precursor of
the World Wide Web, which works so much better that all the old Gopher
systems have shut down.
The old Archie system is still of value. It lets you search servers
worldwide for a particular file, such as a driver for an obsolete
piece of computer hardware. But nowadays, there are Web resources that
offer much the same service - www.download.com comes to mind. Archie
is still useful for hunting hard-to-find resources, but only hard-core
geeks use it.
Now it's Usenet's turn, and that's hardly a surprise. The system can
be confusing and difficult for newbies to learn. Even though browsers
have built-in Usenet reading software, you must know a little
something about the Usenet to get everything set up. It's a long way
from point and click.
Then there's the Usenet's notorious style, laced with flaming insults,
foul language, and a good deal of smut. Hamaide told me that Talkway
users were shocked to visit Beanie Baby bulletin boards on Usenet and
find ads for pornography. Lots of home computer users would flee,
never to return.
And they don't have to. As promised, Web entrepreneurs are succeeding
in establishing clean, attractive neighborhoods that are attracting
tenants who once would have hung out on Usenet. Look at the loyal
denizens of the eBay auction site bulletin board, or Yahoo's popular
personal finance boards.
And new Web-based technologies offer even more impressive Usenet
alternatives. The Globe's own parent, The New York Times Co., operates
a clever new service called Abuzz (www.abuzz.com), where people can
post questions and get answers from other members of the service.
I posted a question on Millard Fillmore's vice president. I got an
answer within hours, via e-mail. The answer is also published on the
Web, so others can read it, and stored in an archive, so future
visitors can look it up. Users can even grade each others' responses.
Abuzz is cool stuff, and newbies will flock to it, as they have to
other on-line communities. But what about the Usenet? Wonderful as it
is, the original on-line community is beginning to resemble a charming
19th-century suburb, now surrounded by looming skyscrapers.
Write Hiawatha Bray at bray@globe.com.
This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 1/20/1999. c
Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
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