WebliminalBlog

I’ve used Usenet on and off (mostly off lately) since 1994. I’ve included a chapter or a portion of chapter about using Usenet in all the Internet & Web books that I’ve written since 1995. I’ve been teaching courses about using the Internet since about that same time. My students over the past five years or more have been totally clueless about the existence of Usenet and, just as importantly, they see it as irrelevant. Over the years it’s been harder to convince my publisher that we should take up the page space with information about Usenet. Now, as Karen Hartman and I considering writing a fifth edition of our book Searching and Researching, we’ll have to evaluate whether to include a section on using Usenet.

In the current edition, we defaulted to the Google Groups interface to Usenet. It is easy to use, but you don’t get the same appreciation for threading that you get with a traditional newsreader interface.

Usenet certainly does not have the following it once had, but still it is one of the few places you can go to ‘ask the experts.’ That is, if the ‘experts’ are reading the newsgroups.

Browsing some of the newsgroups I used to haunt it looks like there still is a fair amount of activity, but many of the FAQs aren’t being kept up to date in what appears to me to be a lack of new moderators/maintainers willing to take up the task.

Using Usenet – Useful Tool or Dead Technology? is a good resource about the current state of Usenet with a number of links to guides to using Usenet, newsreader software, and newsgroup hosts.

I also found the Wikipedia entry about Usenet a worthwhile read, containing this quote:

Usenet has been described as system of online collaboration and interaction similar to today’s Web 2.0.[1] It has also been pointed out that its decentralized structure makes it more democratic than Web 2.0. [2]

So Usenet is still around and likely becoming more esoteric and more a relic of the past with each newbie that comes to the Internet. Since it is a substantial source of information, it’s likely to appear in the 5th edition of Searching and Researching, but its role will again be diminished.

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DoD Confirmation List Latest Coalition Fatality: May 30, 2007

Source: Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count