September 5, 2003
From Usenet to Blog
I still read and post to some Usenet groups. For many specialized areas of interest Usenet and some of the other list serve environments still seems a better medium then blogging for staying on top of a specific subject matter.
The other day Phil Wolff wrote a piece that makes an interesting case for Usenet leading the way for blogging. He describes a number of similarities which Jen acknowledges and then adds two more from her experience:
Two other similarities that crossed my mind were the varying signal-to-noise ratio of each "channel", as well as the increasing sense of information overload that I got from Usenet, and am getting from the blogosphere.The signal-to-noise issue reminds me of yesterday's post on civility. It is often clear that many Usenet users as well as bloggers seem to have extra time to troll, write thought free insulting posts, or engage in long 'humor' threads that lose their humor about 7 posts in.
As for information overload, the large and growing number of interesting blogs potentially fills all available time plus some more.
Oh, and Wolff also links to a nice short style post that while originally target at the Usenet crowd is relevant to the blogging community.
Posted by Steve on September 5, 2003
