Newsgroups and Blogs

K. Scott Allen has an interesting entry contrasting newsgroups and blogs:

Blogs gives people a place to “push: ideas, in contrast to newsgroups and mailing lists, where it seems more acceptable to “pull” ideas by asking questions. Pull would work so much better if people didn’t ask the same questions over and over again each day.

I used to read Usenet newsgroups a lot but stopped several years ago. They’re still a good resource but the noise level is too high. Now I use Google to search newsgroups if I want to look for something I can’t find elsewhere. A lot of companies provide public news servers (separate from Usenet) for vendor-specific discussion forums. I don’t use them too frequently.

According to Google groups, I first posted to Usenet in 1986. I started reading newsgroups a couple years earlier. Notice the weird email address? Top-level domain names (.com, .edu, .org, …) had only been in use for a short while. Pseudo-domains such as .UUCP were in common use. In fact, if you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see the god-awful syntax that was used to manually route email via UUCP:

..{talcott,mit-eddie,frog}!ci-dandelion!congdon

Translation: if you can reach talcott, mit-eddie or frog, you’ll be able to route through to ci-dandelion to reach me. UUCP maps were distributed back then in Usenet newsgroups to provide routing information to automate this process. DNS came along to provide a consistent hierarchical naming scheme and mechanism for finding other hosts. (K. Scott Allen link via Robert Scoble)