"Usenet is ready to go mainstream..."
Shelton Garner
<snip>
In the aftermath of big business' near–complete colonization of the
Web, Usenet seems too good to be true for would–be marketers. Its
estimated 25 million users have organized themselves into at least
25,000 distinct affinity groups that are almost untouched by
conventional advertising (not counting the endless traffic of
get–rich–quick schemes and quick–weight–loss promises).
"I liken Usenet to the Web in 1994," says Kevin Harvey, a partner at
the Benchmark Capital investment firm in Menlo Park, Calif. "It's got
a small core of users, a huge amount of information and, of course,
lots of garbage." Taking Usenet mainstream, he says, is a "slam dunk."
Harvey is so sure of Usenet's potential that Benchmark contributed a
significant, though undisclosed, part of San Jose–based Supernews' $4
million in first–round funding. Supernews hopes to take the formerly
noncommercial Usenet to the Web masses – and turn a tidy profit in the
process. Eric Hahn, the founder of collaborative software maker
Collabra, left as CTO of Netscape to join the Supernews board in early
June. And the company says it is spending much of August in
partnership negotiations with the major search engines.
Plenty of companies have caught Usenet fever. Deja News was the first
to port Usenet onto the Web three years ago, with the goal of making
Usenet's thousands of newsgroups searchable. It recently wooed
Atlantic Monthly publisher Scott Ford to serve as executive VP, in a
bold bid to transform Deja News into a media and portal company.
Meanwhile, Ziff–Davis has been so happy with its content partnership
with Deja News that in July it invested $5 million out of a total of
$11.5 million in Deja News' third round of funding.
In May, Sunnyvale–based start–up Talkway released its Java–based
newsgroup reader. And firms like ISPNews, HighWind Software, Grapevine
Technologies and others are trying to make it possible for corporate
users to easily access Usenet through company firewalls.
<snip>
And much of Usenet is uncharted territory. Once you download a list of
the thousands of newsgroups, it's often hard to find your way around
nonintuitive top–level categories like alt, rec and soc, not to
mention the countless local and international divisions.
<snip>
"Usenet's been there for a while, but it's not There with a capital
'T,'" laughs David Lawrence, a Vermont–based programmer who spends an
hour a day moderating news.announce.newgroups, the unofficial
clearinghouse for all new newsgroups. "It appeals to a certain type of
person, but I just don't see it being on the tip of everyone's
tongue."
<snip>
New technologies like Web–based browsers and spam filters are also
emerging to make Usenet easier and safer to access. "For years Usenet
service was more or less a best effort – it sort of worked," says
Robert Fleischman, founder and CTO of HighWind Software, a
Marlborough, Mass.–based company that services commercial Internet
news providers. "Just recently the infrastructure of Usenet has hit
the point where we're about ready for some excitement. It's the next
Web."
<snip>
But some observers see in Usenet the same potential e–mail promised.
"E–mail was very clunky and inaccessible just two years ago, but look
at what Hotmail has done," says Supernews boardmember Eric Hahn. "I
think you'll see Usenet start to pervade our communications structure.
It's not going to be much different than electronic mail or early
faxes were."
lee
L. Shelton Bumgarner -- Keeper of the Great Renaming FAQ
Nattering Nabob of Narcissism * http://www.nottowayez.net/~leebum/
ICQ#: 9393354 * "Given two unrelated technical terms, an Internet
search engine will retrieve only resumes." -- Schachter's Hypothesis
Jim Kingdon
Shrug. If the new companies are good citizens the same way that
Dejanews has been (as far as I can tell), this should be a good thing.
Well, and if the Big 8 can't handle the influx of new users, then it
will be good for net.* :-). Personally, I think usenet is pretty
resilient; we've survived a whole lot in the past (including influxes
of new users) and so I don't know what else they could do to us :-).
I expect to see more new hierarchies and provider-local groups, though
(e.g. dejanews.* already exists, netscape.*, &c). The Big 8 just
can't scale up quickly enough to handle the kind of growth rate that
invester-oriented companies want to see.
Bill Cole
<kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>The Big 8 just
>can't scale up quickly enough to handle the kind of growth rate that
>invester-oriented companies want to see.
Jim, have you looked at the historical stats?
Usenet has a history of scaling at about a 200% per year growth rate.
Higher than that pre-96, when it was doubling in readership, byte volume,
and article volume almost every 6 months.
--
I am moving to Detroit! Anyone there need a BOFH?
See http://www.inlink.com/~scconsul/resume.html for a resume.
See http://www.inlink.com/~scconsul/name.html for the explanation of
my name amorphism.
Jim Kingdon
Not in detail. Thanks for posting some.
> Usenet has a history of scaling at about a 200% per year growth rate.
> Higher than that pre-96, when it was doubling in readership, byte volume,
> and article volume almost every 6 months.
Thanks for the data. Do you have any data for Big 8 only? I would
guess that the growth rate is slowing even more there, but that is
pretty much speculation.
I guess my assumption (which prove to be untrue, but it is my
intuition of how things are going), is that the Big 8 group creation
process has hit a fairly hard limit in terms of how many newsgroup
proposals per year it can handle, and the only way to break through
this limit is to totally revamp the process. In practice, this is
likely to occur by people moving to other hierarchies, rather than the
Big 8 changing that much (again, just my intuition/guess).
Of course, adding groups is only one measure of scaling; the amount of
traffic per group can also be expected to increase although the busy
groups are probably already at a self-limiting point (where people
tend to leave the groups because there is too much traffic).
Increasing the lurker/poster ratio is another way to scale
(particularly relevant to selling advertising and the like).
You see, from the investor's point of view (venture capitalist
particularly), there is no reason to start a business unless it has
the potential for $100 million in revenue per year. My feeling is
that the Big 8 isn't really big enough to be enough, and isn't growing
quickly enough to get there within the investment "horizon" (usually 3
years). Now, combined with site-local groups and other hierarchies,
it seems more doable, but that is a bit different from a Big
8-centered strategy.
I should re-emphasize the amount of guesswork involved in all of
this. As far as I know, no one has a clear idea of how many dollars
per reader one could hope to get or anything like that. Those who
wait until after the answers are known will be too late. This kind of
puzzle is what keeps business interesting.
Jeremy
> In the aftermath of big business' near\226complete
geez, could you at least do something with your character set?
> Harvey is so sure of Usenet's potential that Benchmark contributed a
> significant, though undisclosed, part of San Jose based Supernews' $4
> million in first round funding. Supernews hopes to take the formerly
> noncommercial Usenet to the Web masses
Um... no, just so we're clear on this, that is really not what we're
trying to do.
Unlike, say, Dejanews, which is becoming more disturbing by the day;
http://beta4.dejanews.com - doesn't even use the word "newsgroup" or
"Usenet" anywhere, and tries as hard as it can to make the groups look
like web-forums on their site. There isn't even a link where you can
go to find out what the hell it is you're participating in.
This bothers me.
Supernews will be providing a web-based newsreader. We won't be trying
to keep people from knowing what it is. Heck, they're even trying to work
out one-click-to-the-group-FAQ.
--
Jeremy | jer...@exit109.com
"...by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
--Russ Allbery
Jim Kingdon
> http://beta4.dejanews.com - doesn't even use the word "newsgroup" or
> "Usenet" anywhere
Hmm, in a little looking around I found:
Travel Forums
acc.sbell.usa-today.travel
alt.travel
alt.travel.rides
bit.listserv.travel-l
iijnet.travel
rec.travel.misc
tsukuba.travel
which strikes me as OK. As long as you can see the newsgroup name,
that is the important part. That they sometimes call it a "Forum"
strikes me as slightly futile/silly (surely "Group" is just as
comprehensible to the beginner?), but harmless as far as I can tell.
Actually, if users have used software in the past which calls it a
Forum, using that word might actually enhance their netiquette. I
don't know...
I agree that it is a Bad Thing if the software fuzzes things to the
point where users aren't clear on there being various newsgroups and
which one they are posting to.
I clicked the "Post" button on
http://beta4.dejanews.com/channels/tvl/tvl_pc1.shtml and got (among
other text):
Group:
dejanews.channels.travel
Well, if you are posting to a dejanews-local group, I am a lot less
worried about any of this, and consider it to be basically dejanews's
issue.
Dejanews does bug me, sometimes, though. Like the fact that I can
never seem to find where "browse groups" has gone off to this week.
Come to think of it, I had some trouble doing the same thing on
Supernews too. Might be my browser (X Mosaic, yes the ancient one).
> Supernews will be providing a web-based newsreader. We won't be trying
> to keep people from knowing what it is. Heck, they're even trying to work
> out one-click-to-the-group-FAQ.
Cool. One-click-to-the-FAQ is a cool idea (there are various problems
which have prevented this from working well for me in software I've
tried in the past, but probably they are solvable).
Jeremy
[...]
> I agree that it is a Bad Thing if the software fuzzes things to the
> point where users aren't clear on there being various newsgroups and
> which one they are posting to.
>
> I clicked the "Post" button on
> http://beta4.dejanews.com/channels/tvl/tvl_pc1.shtml and got (among
> other text):
>
> Group:
> dejanews.channels.travel
>
> Well, if you are posting to a dejanews-local group, I am a lot less
> worried about any of this, and consider it to be basically dejanews's
> issue.
Yes, the local groups are theirs, they can do what they like with them.
But it just seems... I dunno, "fuzzy" is a good word you used up there.
They don't tell you you're posting to Usenet, or offer any information
on what Usenet is, before letting you loose. Something offering up
news.announce.newusers would be most welcome, for example.
> Dejanews does bug me, sometimes, though. Like the fact that I can
> never seem to find where "browse groups" has gone off to this week.
I use the power search on almost a daily basis. The last time they
changed it, I sat there looking at it for 30 seconds, thinking the
"newsgroup" field had been removed, before I found that they'd just
renamed it to "forum". The fact that the text is so small I have to
lean forward to read it doesn't help, but that seems to be the "in"
thing these days with websites (and, in fairness, I do run 1280x1024
on a 17-inch monitor, but I *set* my fonts to compensate, dammit).
> Come to think of it, I had some trouble doing the same thing on
> Supernews too. Might be my browser (X Mosaic, yes the ancient one).
The Supernews thingy is still under active development. It's barely
ready to be called beta, I think, though I don't get a say (as I'm
not involved with that project at all).
>> Supernews will be providing a web-based newsreader. We won't be trying
>> to keep people from knowing what it is. Heck, they're even trying to
>> work out one-click-to-the-group-FAQ.
>
> Cool. One-click-to-the-FAQ is a cool idea (there are various problems
> which have prevented this from working well for me in software I've
> tried in the past, but probably they are solvable).
There was talk about solving it by creating a searchable FAQ Repository
site, though I'm not sure what ever came of that idea; since I don't
work on the site or that software, I don't pay 100% attention.
--
Jeremy | jer...@exit109.com
"Never tell me the odds." --Han Solo
Jim Kingdon
> doesn't help, but that seems to be the "in" thing these days with
> websites (and, in fairness, I do run 1280x1024 on a 17-inch monitor,
> but I *set* my fonts to compensate, dammit).
Well, this sort of thing is why I try to set my browser to ignore as
much as possible of their so-called web design. I would go totally
batty if I had to use the author's colors, for example.
Unfortunately, there isn't really a web browser that lets you do this
well and has the various other things one needs. Lynx is the best in
many ways, but I don't like the keybindings and I do want a _few_
graphical capabilities (although images are, of course, not loaded
automatically).
Jeremy
> Well, this sort of thing is why I try to set my browser to ignore as
> much as possible of their so-called web design. I would go totally
> batty if I had to use the author's colors, for example.
>
> Unfortunately, there isn't really a web browser that lets you do this
> well and has the various other things one needs. Lynx is the best in
> many ways, but I don't like the keybindings and I do want a _few_
> graphical capabilities (although images are, of course, not loaded
> automatically).
I pretty much let 'em do their thing, myself. If they're a dork, I'll
see that they're a dork. And some pages get all messed up if you try
to override the "design" to make them readable.
I'm no purist, though. I like cool-looking stuff as much as the next
guy -- as long as it's still usable, and still usable in Lynx too.
Dejanews remains quite usable, for what I use it for, which is searches.
--
Jeremy | jer...@exit109.com
"I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast;
for I intend to go in harm's way." --John Paul Jones
Wednesday
Bill Cole <bi...@scconsult.com> wrote:
>Usenet has a history of scaling at about a 200% per year growth rate.
>Higher than that pre-96, when it was doubling in readership, byte volume,
>and article volume almost every 6 months.
* wednesday mutters something about how the byte volume increases are
probably unnecessarily quoted material in replies, the article volume is
probably nonsignificantly made up of "ME TOO" or "ADD ME TO THE LIST OF
NAKED ERNEST BORGNINE JPEGS PLZ," and why yes, she's in a GREAT mood.
--
Cross the line and you're electrocuted. wedn...@chiark.greenend.org.uk.
Tony Finch
>jer...@exit109.com (Jeremy) wrote:
>>
>> The fact that the text is so small I have to lean forward to read it
>> doesn't help, but that seems to be the "in" thing these days with
>> websites (and, in fairness, I do run 1280x1024 on a 17-inch monitor,
>> but I *set* my fonts to compensate, dammit).
>
>much as possible of their so-called web design. I would go totally
>batty if I had to use the author's colors, for example.
>
>Unfortunately, there isn't really a web browser that lets you do this
>well and has the various other things one needs. Lynx is the best in
>many ways, but I don't like the keybindings and I do want a _few_
>graphical capabilities (although images are, of course, not loaded
>automatically).
Lynx annoys me too much. I haven't yet found a browser that sucks
sufficiently less than Netscape to make me want to change. One of the
things that really annoyed me was that even if you told it to "use my
colors" and "use my fonts" it didn't. (In particular, it still
respects table background colours and font size changes.) And the
implementation of frames is so broken it makes me want to scream.
So I wrote htmlf. The web is nicer now.
http://www.inch.demon.co.uk/htmlf.html
Tony.
--
F.A.N.Finch d...@dotat.at fa...@demon.net +44-7970-401-426
genes <=> memes proteins <=> algorithms amino acids <=> machine code
Jim Kingdon
> http://www.inch.demon.co.uk/htmlf.html
That is a pretty cool solution. For those of you too lazy to read the
page, it strips out (configurably) colors and fonts and other
problems, by sitting as a proxy between the browser and the web.
Framemode 'lynx' is simple and usable. I've also thought of another
framemode which would fetch each of the framed pages and concatenate
them (wouldn't fit so well into a non-caching proxy, though). Then
again, just losing interest in pages if I spend too much time
wandering through the frames also works :-).
Jim Kingdon
> probably unnecessarily quoted material in replies, the article volume is
> probably nonsignificantly made up of "ME TOO" or "ADD ME TO THE LIST OF
> NAKED ERNEST BORGNINE JPEGS PLZ," and why yes, she's in a GREAT mood.
I knew I should drop by alt.fan.wednesday more often....
Yes, and we can feel very virtuous in net.* because we have almost no
traffic (of any sort) cluttering up those beautiful pristine news
servers :-).
Matt McLeod
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>> The fact that the text is so small I have to lean forward to read it
>> doesn't help, but that seems to be the "in" thing these days with
>> websites (and, in fairness, I do run 1280x1024 on a 17-inch monitor,
>> but I *set* my fonts to compensate, dammit).
>
>Well, this sort of thing is why I try to set my browser to ignore as
>much as possible of their so-called web design. I would go totally
>batty if I had to use the author's colors, for example.
>
>Unfortunately, there isn't really a web browser that lets you do this
>well and has the various other things one needs. Lynx is the best in
>many ways, but I don't like the keybindings and I do want a _few_
>graphical capabilities (although images are, of course, not loaded
>automatically).
When stuck using Windows, I find Opera to be reasonably good
at this stuff - it has a nice "my settings/their settings" toggle
button in easy reach, so getting rid of the often really bad colour
combinations is dead simple. This one feature is the thing I most
want in a GUI browser, and if Mozilla wasn't so damn big I might
even be tempted to take a crack at it. Can't be *that* difficult,
can it?
I don't recall if it also does this with fonts, but I suspect it
doesn't. But I generally have more trouble with colours than fonts
anyway.
ISTR Emacs W3 doing some image stuff - might it be suitable?
Bit bulky if you're only using it as a web browser, but probably
still smaller than Internet Exploder.
(FWIW, I find the idea of the marketroids "discovering" Usenet
a bit disturbing. But I don't suppose they can do anything
worse than the pr0n spammers, and they'll probably be a bit
more polite).
Matt
Tony Finch
>
>ISTR Emacs W3 doing some image stuff - might it be suitable?
>Bit bulky if you're only using it as a web browser, but probably
>still smaller than Internet Exploder.
The problem I have with it is it isn't sufficiently multi-threaded --
if I'm also doing other stuff in emacs I don't want it to stop while a
slow web page downloads.
Tony Finch
>Tony Finch <d...@dotat.at> wrote:
>> So I wrote htmlf. The web is nicer now.
>> http://www.inch.demon.co.uk/htmlf.html
>
>That is a pretty cool solution.
Cheers :-)
>Framemode 'lynx' is simple and usable. I've also thought of another
>framemode which would fetch each of the framed pages and concatenate
>them (wouldn't fit so well into a non-caching proxy, though).
Hmm. That could be doable. I might play around with the idea when I
have the right sort of tuit. Unanimating GIFs comes first, though :-)
Wednesday
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>I knew I should drop by alt.fan.wednesday more often....
Well, duh.
>Yes, and we can feel very virtuous in net.* because we have almost no
>traffic (of any sort) cluttering up those beautiful pristine news
>servers :-).
I'm this black sheep or some shit; I like it that way. USENET did just
fine for years without hordes and globs of traffic, and to some extent
I think the quiet is helpful and restful.
Russ Allbery
> I'm this black sheep or some shit; I like it that way. USENET did just
> fine for years without hordes and globs of traffic, and to some extent I
> think the quiet is helpful and restful.
I have to admit I don't particularly mind it either. The signal is very
high, the noise is nonexistent... I'm not particularly upset that it isn't
too busy for me to read everything.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Matt McLeod
>m...@natasha.apana.org.au (Matt McLeod) wrote:
>>
>>ISTR Emacs W3 doing some image stuff - might it be suitable?
>>Bit bulky if you're only using it as a web browser, but probably
>>still smaller than Internet Exploder.
>
>The problem I have with it is it isn't sufficiently multi-threaded --
>if I'm also doing other stuff in emacs I don't want it to stop while a
>slow web page downloads.
Good point. As I don't use emacs for editting (that's what vim is for),
it isn't a problem I've really noticed. :-)
Matt
Jim Kingdon
> fine for years without hordes and globs of traffic, and to some extent
> I think the quiet is helpful and restful.
Oh, don't fear, if there were more traffic I'd surely be complaining
and saying "what is all this noise? what are all these groups?" :-).
My biggest problem, I suppose, is that the traffic keeps popping up in
different groups and I never can be quite sure how I have my .newsrc
set (I did, at one point, start unsubscribing to net.* groups because
I didn't have the time/inclination to read them, but I don't remember
whether that is still true :-)).
YoYo
>Wednesday <wedn...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>
>> I'm this black sheep or some shit; I like it that way. USENET did just
>> fine for years without hordes and globs of traffic, and to some extent I
>> think the quiet is helpful and restful.
>
>I have to admit I don't particularly mind it either. The signal is very
>high, the noise is nonexistent... I'm not particularly upset that it isn't
>too busy for me to read everything.
Count me in. I enjoy the fact that almost everything here is worth
reading. Even if it turns out to be crap, it's at least usually
entertaining crap.
--
----YoYo------...@tezcat.com------------and stuff------
"Consider this rule of thumb: To the extent that philosophical
positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they
are likely to be wrong." -Edward O. Wilson
Jim Kingdon
> Mozilla wasn't so damn big I might even be tempted to take a crack at
> it. Can't be *that* difficult, can it?
Yeah, I suspect the big problem with hacking Mozilla would just be
downloading the thing, figuring out how it builds, and getting some
semblance of a clue about what code is where.
If you do manage to put in a "my settings/their settings" (or "my
settings" features in general), you won't be the only person who
thinks this is just what Mozilla needs. See for example
http://www.pobox.com/%7Emeta/mozuki/ which is a great page in
describing what I want in a browser, but which is vaporware in terms
of actually writing any code.
Jim Kingdon
It has potential, I like the user interface better than lynx. But I
found it slow and memory-hungry. There are some interesting ideas out
there for how this could be fixed (e.g. some kind of general parser
module in C, parsing HTML in elisp is _not_ a good idea), but I don't
know that anyone has done anything about this.
> (FWIW, I find the idea of the marketroids "discovering" Usenet
> a bit disturbing. But I don't suppose they can do anything
> worse than the pr0n spammers, and they'll probably be a bit
> more polite).
Oh, I find it a bit disturbing too (even if I think it probably will
be a Good Thing on the whole), and we might have to fight off various
kinds of bad behavior. But yeah, I suspect they will be more
suspectible to being handed a clue than, say the *.jobs.* losers.
The thing about marketing on usenet, is that, as nearly as I can tell
from my own logs and my own (netiquette-wise) participation in
comp.software.config-mgmt, is that it isn't really very effective
(compared with the time I spend on it, or compared with getting web
sites to link to ours, or that sort of thing).
Not that I expect the marketroids to figure this out...
Christi Alice Scarborough
>There was talk about solving it by creating a searchable FAQ Repository
>site, though I'm not sure what ever came of that idea; since I don't
>work on the site or that software, I don't pay 100% attention.
I think you're talking about http://www.faqs.org/
Christi
--
Christi Alice Scarborough - http://www.aber.ac.uk/~ccs95 BOFHdom's answer
Not a member of the Lusty Wench Cabal (TINC) to Wednesday.
"Taken out of context I must seem so strange" Ani DiFranco # Caffeine != Sheep
Christian Sommerer
Garner) wrote:
>In the aftermath of big business' near–complete colonization of the
>Web,
"Colonization"? To me it's more an invasion... :(
>Usenet seems too good to be true for would–be marketers.
I hope those "marketers" will finally someday choke on their own money
and their own slogans! :(
>Its estimated 25 million users have organized themselves into at least
>25,000 distinct affinity groups that are almost untouched by
>conventional advertising (not counting the endless traffic of
>get–rich–quick schemes and quick–weight–loss promises).
"Conventional advertising"? Do they mean the same barrage of shit we
are bombarded with through TV?
God, it's difficult for me to see Usenet going down the same filthy
drain... :(
After all Usenet is one of the most powerful - if not the most
powerful - communication media ever created...
If used properly (which it isn't today for the most time), this power
could do so much good to the world, but used for pointless and
mind-numbing advertising... That's just too much! :(
I think we can only hope, that Usenet has the power to withstand this
threat - it's still a two-way medium in contrast to TV, which has
always been one-way...
--
Christian Sommerer elr...@gmx.net
Matt McLeod
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>If you do manage to put in a "my settings/their settings" (or "my
>settings" features in general), you won't be the only person who
>thinks this is just what Mozilla needs. See for example
>http://www.pobox.com/%7Emeta/mozuki/ which is a great page in
>describing what I want in a browser, but which is vaporware in terms
>of actually writing any code.
Thanks! That looks like exactly what I'd like, too.
Hm. I suppose now I'm going to have to take the time to download
the Mozilla source and start poking around...
Matt
Matt McLeod
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>> (FWIW, I find the idea of the marketroids "discovering" Usenet
>> a bit disturbing. But I don't suppose they can do anything
>> worse than the pr0n spammers, and they'll probably be a bit
>> more polite).
>
>Oh, I find it a bit disturbing too (even if I think it probably will
>be a Good Thing on the whole), and we might have to fight off various
>kinds of bad behavior. But yeah, I suspect they will be more
>suspectible to being handed a clue than, say the *.jobs.* losers.
>
>The thing about marketing on usenet, is that, as nearly as I can tell
>from my own logs and my own (netiquette-wise) participation in
>comp.software.config-mgmt, is that it isn't really very effective
>(compared with the time I spend on it, or compared with getting web
>sites to link to ours, or that sort of thing).
On Usenet, they bite back. :-)
About the best most companies can do, I would guess, is something
like what Microprose used to do on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic -
have a couple of reps hang around in the group providing info
upon request and passing customer feedback back to wherever it
needs to go. This was quite useful from my POV, but I guess
Microprose didn't see it that way - or they ran out of money.
Unless we're talking vendor-specific hierachies, but AFAIK in that case
they'd have to try and build up their own distribution networks
to make that fly, unless they want to do a Microsoft and have it
all running on the one server (farm?).
Matt
Peter da Silva
Matt McLeod <m...@natasha.apana.org.au> wrote:
>Hm. I suppose now I'm going to have to take the time to download
>the Mozilla source and start poking around...
Is it worthwhile hacking on Mozilla? So much of the software is missing
(the big part being the email handling, which is the part I most want to
fix) and they don't have a demonstrated commitment to keeping it open yet.
--
This is The Reverend Peter da Silva's Boring Sig File - there are no references
to Wolves, Kibo, Discordianism, or The Church of the Subgenius in this document
> We must make sure our momentum aligns with our value-added distribution! <
Peter da Silva
Christian Sommerer <elr...@gmx.net> wrote:
>On Sat, 08 Aug 1998 16:06:20 GMT, lee...@nottowayez.net (Shelton
>Garner) wrote:
>>In the aftermath of big business' near–complete colonization of the
>>Web,
>"Colonization"? To me it's more an invasion... :(
Domine domine domine, you're all Catholics now!
Jim Kingdon
Shrug. The alternatives don't seem so great to me. Then again, I'm
thinking of it from the web browser angle, not the mail/news angle.
> So much of the software is missing (the big part being the email
> handling, which is the part I most want to fix)
Well, I have two reactions, one is that you could plug in some other
email client/code (not having ever used Netscape's email handling, I'm
not sure what is good/bad about it), and the other is that within the
last week they have released an email package (this is rewritten from
what was in past Netscape products, so apparently they want to fix it
too, see http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/).
> they don't have a demonstrated commitment to keeping it open yet.
The amount of money they've spent on this release is to me _some_
evidence of commitment (they have 6 people working in the Mozilla
group, granted some of that activity would be needed even if it
weren't free but they've also flown out Eric Raymond, bought new
hardware, spent a lot of time poring through code to figure out what
they can release, flying people to Linux Expo, &c). Perhaps more
important than their past commitment is that they still face the same
threat from Microsoft which led them to do this in the first place.
But perhaps the best way to keep it open is to try to develop a
community of people who are hacking on it. That way, if Netscape did
pull out, then there would be something left (sort of like Apache and
NCSA except this situation is better, because the Netscape license
would let you take the code with you and keep it free).
Mark Atwood
>
> In article <35d44729...@news.easynews.net> Christian Sommerer <elr...@gmx.net> wrote:
>
> >"Colonization"? To me it's more an invasion... :(
>
> Domine domine domine, you're all Catholics now!
So you may say, but I will refuse to go to Mass, and will continue
practicing the "Old Religion" out in the woods...
*grin*
--
Mark Atwood |He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already
m...@pobox.com|earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake,
|since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. -- Einstein
Christian Sommerer
wrote:
>(FWIW, I find the idea of the marketroids "discovering" Usenet
>a bit disturbing. But I don't suppose they can do anything
>worse than the pr0n spammers, and they'll probably be a bit
>more polite).
Well, they may be more polite, but they will be posting IMO (nearly)
the same adverts...
But this time you won't be able to do anything about it (no
Spamfilter, cancels, etc.), because now they're *paying* to be able to
place their ads, and they'll be more than happy to sue you if you want
to remove them...
If they really get their way, I fear, that they'll *buy* Usenet... :(
--
Christian Sommerer elr...@gmx.net
Mark Atwood
>
> Well, they may be more polite, but they will be posting IMO (nearly)
> the same adverts...
> But this time you won't be able to do anything about it (no
> Spamfilter, cancels, etc.), because now they're *paying* to be able to
> place their ads,
How is that different from the current situation? Most newsusers are
already paying for the privilage of having read/write access to their
ISP's newsserver.
> and they'll be more than happy to sue you if you want
> to remove them...
On what grounds? I can filter my feeds, censor my spool, and post
control messages to my heart's content. What could their suit compel
me to do?
"Your honor, Mr Atwood, acting on behaf of his employer, has injured
us by not freely donating to us disk space owned by his employer. We
request that you compel him to allow us to give us the space that we
require to advertise to the employees of his employer."
I doubt that will fly in court.
> If they really get their way, I fear, that they'll *buy* Usenet... :(
Buy it from whom?
Jeremy
> Well, they may be more polite, but they will be posting IMO (nearly)
> the same adverts...
> But this time you won't be able to do anything about it (no
> Spamfilter, cancels, etc.), because now they're *paying* to be able to
> place their ads, and they'll be more than happy to sue you if you want
> to remove them...
Paying for access *somewhere*, not necessarily to my servers...
--
Jeremy | jer...@exit109.com
"...by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
--Russ Allbery
Ian Dobbie
> On 9 Aug 1998 11:33:57 GMT, m...@natasha.apana.org.au (Matt McLeod)
> wrote:
[snip]
> If they really get their way, I fear, that they'll *buy* Usenet... :(
Sure they are welcome to it. We take the money and run, using it to setup
2senet as *our* playground.
Ian
Matt McLeod
Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
>In article <6qot98$pkd$1...@attila.apana.org.au>,
>Matt McLeod <m...@natasha.apana.org.au> wrote:
>>Hm. I suppose now I'm going to have to take the time to download
>>the Mozilla source and start poking around...
>
>(the big part being the email handling, which is the part I most want to
I don't care for mail clients built into web browsers, so that at least
isn't a big deal for me.
And as my only real interest in modifying Mozilla is to add a
my-settings/their-settings toggle button, I don't really want to
have to start from scratch (although I sometimes get the impression
that that might not be an entirely bad idea).
Matt
Peter da Silva
Matt McLeod <m...@natasha.apana.org.au> wrote:
>I don't care for mail clients built into web browsers, so that at least
>isn't a big deal for me.
I do care for "mailto:" links working. And I would like to have a fancy
GUI mail program's source code whether it's assciated with a Browser or
not, simply to keep my users happy, but I certainly don't have time to
write one from scratch.
Matt McLeod
Christian Sommerer <elr...@gmx.net> wrote:
>On 9 Aug 1998 11:33:57 GMT, m...@natasha.apana.org.au (Matt McLeod)
>wrote:
>
>>a bit disturbing. But I don't suppose they can do anything
>>worse than the pr0n spammers, and they'll probably be a bit
>>more polite).
>
>the same adverts...
I'm not sure that they will, actually. Either we're looking at
adverts on websites that provide a "gateway" to Usenet for those
too stupid to be able to work a newsreader, in which case it
doesn't effect Usenet itself at all, or we're talking company
reps hanging out on related newsgroups. Assuming for a moment
that the company is taking those groups seriously (and if they're
not, then they wouldn't be paying people to hang out there),
then they're going to take the image the present fairly
seriously too. So they'll more-or-less behave themselves.
>But this time you won't be able to do anything about it (no
>Spamfilter, cancels, etc.), because now they're *paying* to be able to
>place their ads, and they'll be more than happy to sue you if you want
>to remove them...
How so? Are they going to pay every organisation/person that
owns a news server? The most they can buy from their own provider(s)
is a committment on the part of the provider to try and distribute
it - their provider can't control what other people might or might
not do.
So if they do post their ads, and I (for example) go and cancel
them, or add them to some NoCeM's or something, what can they sue
me for? I've got no contract with them, so they can't do me on
those grounds. They don't own the servers which choose to accept
my cancels, so they've got no property rights they can use either.
And even if they think they can sue me - what jurisdiction are
they going to do it in? If I "publish" the cancels in NSW, does
a Californian court have jurisdiction? Or what if I publish
in Finland, but live in Australia, while they're in New York?
>If they really get their way, I fear, that they'll *buy* Usenet... :(
Who from? They can buy some servers, but they can't buy the whole
thing, since no one party owns it in the first place. And if they
do, so what? People will just move on to other groups, on other
servers.
Maybe I'm just too optomistic today?
Matt
Peter da Silva
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>Well, I have two reactions, one is that you could plug in some other
>email client/code (not having ever used Netscape's email handling, I'm
>not sure what is good/bad about it),
If there was another one out there worth plugging in, I wouldn't be looking
at it in the first place.
>and the other is that within the
>last week they have released an email package (this is rewritten from
>what was in past Netscape products, so apparently they want to fix it
>too, see http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/).
Cool. That's a good start. Thanks for the info.
>> they don't have a demonstrated commitment to keeping it open yet.
>The amount of money they've spent on this release is to me _some_
>evidence of commitment
There's plusses and minuses there. They want results, but they also want
a return on that investment.
>But perhaps the best way to keep it open is to try to develop a
>community of people who are hacking on it. That way, if Netscape did
>pull out, then there would be something left (sort of like Apache and
>NCSA except this situation is better, because the Netscape license
>would let you take the code with you and keep it free).
There's no hidden gotchas in their license? There's been a lot of FUD
going on over it.
Wednesday
In article <6qs2vr$1...@bonkers.taronga.com>,
Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
> > We must make sure our momentum aligns with our value-added distribution! <
My boss saw me reading this Dilbert in frustration after he rewrote some of
my user documentation, changing it from useful, informative material into
marketing cack. I don't know if he was kidding when he said:
"I'm going to have to use that."
Jim Kingdon
If you do any playing with this, I'd be at least faintly curious in
hearing what you find. It wasn't clear to me whether it was useful or
whether it was just "Joe Netscape's random code" (or both :-)).
> There's plusses and minuses there. They want results, but they also want
> a return on that investment.
Well, my intuition is that they'll get a better return from open
source than they would from closing it, especially since we are
talking about browsers and other client software, and servers and
portals and other value adds are probably more promising as a revenue
stream (if they can get their act together, that is).
On a purely fuzzy level, I've met the Mozilla people and my impression
is that their hearts are in the right place, rather than there being
something backhanded about the whole thing. But I also realize that
they are n levels down from anyone making decisions at Netscape.
> There's no hidden gotchas in their license? There's been a lot of FUD
> going on over it.
In response to this post I was reading it looking for something, and I
didn't see anything hidden. But my patience for legalese seems to
declining rapidly as time goes on, so don't take this as a detailed
examination.
Now, it is true that the NPL (not MozPL, which you can use for your
new code provided it isn't in the same source files) does give
Netscape special rights (that is, they are the only ones allowed to
"hoard"), and to be honest I've never fully understood the supposed
incompatibility with the GPL (well, I guess because the GPL doesn't
let you give Netscape special rights. GPL might be compatible with
the MozPL although I haven't thought too hard about that). I didn't
find the license as easy to read as, say, the GPL, but perhaps that is
just because I know the GPL better.
Jim Kingdon
> my-settings/their-settings toggle button, I don't really want to
> have to start from scratch (although I sometimes get the impression
> that that might not be an entirely bad idea).
Well, I can say that it has been tried. I'm not 100% sure that
starting from scratch would be a bad idea (especially if one's goal is
to keep things minimal rather than put in loads of features like
Netscape or Internet Exploder), but I can say that I would take a
closer look at Mozilla, grail, Mnemonic, lynx, arena, &c, before I did
such a thing.
Jim Kingdon
> Assuming for a moment that the company is taking those groups
> seriously (and if they're not, then they wouldn't be paying people to
> hang out there),
I don't expect that. This whole thing is coming about partly because
web sites like sidewalk.com and <insert your favorite flashy "web
content" site which spent a bunch of money and didn't get much
revenue, I don't remember names> are finding it is too expensive to
write content and that they want to try to figure out a way to get the
community to provide the content, at less cost to them.
> Who from? They can buy some servers, but they can't buy the whole
> thing, since no one party owns it in the first place.
Well, making a job offer to David Lawrence (and a few other news.group
type people) and trying to negotiate for the ISC assets might be
doable. Not that doing so would really give you "ownership of usenet"
anyway, and not that you would necessarily want to "own" usenet in any
such sense (it would be a big headache, better off just selling ads
which only apply to people using your newsserver/webnewsserver, or
whatever).
> And if they do, so what? People will just move on to other groups, on
> other servers.
>
> Maybe I'm just too optomistic today?
I'm optimistic in this way too, and no I'm not _sure_ we're right :-).
If I'm pessimistic about usenet, it is because I fear the whole
edifice will collapse into chaos and fights, and for someone to "own"
it would require the opposite (apathy and sheep-like behavior on the
part of the usenet-reading public). But as we know, "imminent death
of the net predicted" has been often uttered and much less often come
to pass.
Matt McLeod
>Matt McLeod <m...@natasha.apana.org.au> wrote:
>>I don't care for mail clients built into web browsers, so that at least
>>isn't a big deal for me.
>
>I do care for "mailto:" links working. And I would like to have a fancy
>GUI mail program's source code whether it's assciated with a Browser or
>not, simply to keep my users happy, but I certainly don't have time to
>write one from scratch.
I'm generally happy cut'n'pasting the address into mutt.
Plus I really really hate all the GUI MUA's I've seen/tried.
Obviously this doesn't mean that a usable GUI MUA is impossible,
just that I have yet to find one. Communicator's mail stuff
included (IMO it's one of the worst).
As an added bonus, my users are all responsible for their own
choice of MUA, and are mostly using Eudora, Netscape, or Outhouse
on Windows machines, and I have absolutely no influence over their
choice of MUA.
Matt
Christian Sommerer
>pe...@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>>
>> In article <35d44729...@news.easynews.net> Christian Sommerer <elr...@gmx.net> wrote:
>>
>> >"Colonization"? To me it's more an invasion... :(
>>
>> Domine domine domine, you're all Catholics now!
>
>So you may say, but I will refuse to go to Mass, and will continue
>practicing the "Old Religion" out in the woods...
And they'll continue to send their inquisitors to you feeding you
SPAM, SPAAM, SPAAAM until you give in! ;-)
--
Christian Sommerer elr...@gmx.net
Christian Sommerer
>elr...@gmx.net (Christian Sommerer) writes:
>>
>> Well, they may be more polite, but they will be posting IMO (nearly)
>> the same adverts...
>> But this time you won't be able to do anything about it (no
>> Spamfilter, cancels, etc.), because now they're *paying* to be able to
>> place their ads,
>
>How is that different from the current situation?
Well, today many people are paying for their right to access their
ISP's Newsserver...
But perhaps in the "near" future, the (traditional) Usenet traffic
might grow that big, that the current distributed approach is no
longer feasible. ISPs might cease to host own Newsservers and Usenet
as we know it will cease to exist.
There will certainly still be smaller networks, like net.* for
example, but Big Business will take the remaining parts. And *then*
they'll own Usenet. And the real potential of Usenet (Usenet as a
worldwide communication medium, nearly everyone can afford) will be
lost forever.
>> and they'll be more than happy to sue you if you want
>> to remove them...
>
>On what grounds? I can filter my feeds, censor my spool, and post
>control messages to my heart's content.
Of course...
I didn't think. As long as it's still your Server, they can't do
anything about it...
>> If they really get their way, I fear, that they'll *buy* Usenet... :(
>
>Buy it from whom?
From the ISPs, who already handle the majority of the traffic,
although they still view Usenet as something neglegible...
--
Christian Sommerer elr...@gmx.net
Matt McLeod
Definately. Especially since I've got no grand illusions about
my ability to see a large project through on my own, and I have
exactly zero experience writing web browsers.
If I ever get Gnome running satisfactorily, I might play with
the HTML rendering stuff they've got. But since I'm not running
Red Hat (indeed, it's usually FreeBSD, on which I can't even get
Gnome to build), I'm not going to hold my breath.
Natt
Matt McLeod
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>> we're talking company reps hanging out on related newsgroups.
>> Assuming for a moment that the company is taking those groups
>> seriously (and if they're not, then they wouldn't be paying people to
>> hang out there),
>
>I don't expect that. This whole thing is coming about partly because
>web sites like sidewalk.com and <insert your favorite flashy "web
>content" site which spent a bunch of money and didn't get much
>revenue, I don't remember names> are finding it is too expensive to
>write content and that they want to try to figure out a way to get the
>community to provide the content, at less cost to them.
I wasn't quite sure what Lee (or whoever he was quoting) meant
by "go[ing] mainstream". If it's just websites acting as some sort
of frontend to Usenet, then the impact on Usenet is unlikely to
be any worse than WebTV (and maybe I'm reading the wrong groups,
but the only webtv.com posts I see are reposts from
alt.pizza.delivery.drivers [or whatever] in ahbou).
How do you see them grabbing content from Usenet, anyway? Either
they'll have to have people monitoring a large number of groups
to find the stuff worth packaging (they'd need to filter out
the cruft and the dissenting voices for it to be worth money
to corporate clients), or they're just doing a DejaNews and providing
a web interface to Usenet.
>> Who from? They can buy some servers, but they can't buy the whole
>> thing, since no one party owns it in the first place.
>
>Well, making a job offer to David Lawrence (and a few other news.group
>type people) and trying to negotiate for the ISC assets might be
>doable. Not that doing so would really give you "ownership of usenet"
>anyway, and not that you would necessarily want to "own" usenet in any
>such sense (it would be a big headache, better off just selling ads
>which only apply to people using your newsserver/webnewsserver, or
>whatever).
I'm not sure it'd give them anything that they'd value. OK, so
they pick up INN, along with some of the people who've been
helping to keep the whole thing going. But if they do something
like adding license clauses to INN requiring servers to carry
their content, or maybe restrict access to INN, it isn't the
end of the world.
>> And if they do, so what? People will just move on to other groups, on
>> other servers.
>>
>> Maybe I'm just too optomistic today?
>
>I'm optimistic in this way too, and no I'm not _sure_ we're right :-).
>If I'm pessimistic about usenet, it is because I fear the whole
>edifice will collapse into chaos and fights, and for someone to "own"
>it would require the opposite (apathy and sheep-like behavior on the
>part of the usenet-reading public). But as we know, "imminent death
>of the net predicted" has been often uttered and much less often come
>to pass.
So long as there are enough people who care enough to do whatever
is necessary, it'll survive. I think it'd be pretty difficult
to reduce that number below the minimum - the minimum is relatively
small - as 2senet itself shows.
Matt
Jim Kingdon
> they'll have to have people monitoring a large number of groups
> to find the stuff worth packaging (they'd need to filter out
> the cruft and the dissenting voices for it to be worth money
> to corporate clients), or they're just doing a DejaNews and providing
> a web interface to Usenet.
Well, I imagine they'll mostly do a DejaNews. In addition to the web,
this could be by Java, NNTP, or other mechanisms. The point is not
really the technical details, just that (a) it tries to be
user-friendly, and (b) it contains ads alongside the usenet posts, one
way or another.
Dejanews also does monitor groups and finds stuff which they then link
to from their home page. But this isn't any wholesale repackaging, it
is mostly just giving people a few places to start. Go too far down
the road of repackaging the stuff and you are spending too much staff
time again.
<insert suitable disclaimer about how this is just my own speculation>
Bruce Baugh
person dealing with customers on Usenet and semi-related fora
elsewhere (like AOL). The disclaimer here is that my industry is
roleplaying games, and as a small fandom-related industry I don't know
if all the experiences below translate to other, larger, different
industries.
Short form: It sucks. It's usually not worth doing.
Longer form: Some of the public at large are really neat people, full
of enthusiasm and sometimes even grammar, with interesting ideas,
useful comments and suggestions, and all that kind of stuff. They're
marvelous to deal with. It's a positive pleasure to be able to deal
direclty with folks who are reading and using my material, and that of
the people I work with. Sometimes we can clear up accidental mistakes,
or differences of emphasis, and sometimes we can just have mutual fun.
So much for the good news.
The bad news is that there's an extremely rude and loud minority.
These folks want it their way, and will denounce anything else. They
usually show poor reading comprehension, but will not acknowledge
errors. Nor will they accept explicit declarations that the intent of
a work was not what they're claiming. They often pass along extremely
damaging rumors as solid fact, while refusing to take correction or
even acknowledge the possibility of error.
These people are not fun. And while one by himself (almost always
"him", in my experience; profoundly stupid women either don't post
this way or don't post or post this way somewhere I'm not reading) is
manageable, together they reinforce each other. This is one of those
scaling problems of net kookdom.
Yes, one can and should (and this one does) killfile them. But their
insistent participation in various threads requires dealing with their
assertions anyhow, as legitimately confused people of good will seek
clarification, and so on. Flat-out telling them to shut up and go away
a) doesn't work and b) backfires in the form of very bad public
relations, because there will always be more people to pass along the
short and misleading "Company X told Y to piss off" than there will be
to provide proper context.
So they end up sucking the life out of a previously worthwhile forum.
A recent check of my primary publisher's area on AOL showed almost
completely empty except for folks saying "man, this sucks, how come
they're not still here to let us tell them how they're doing it all
wrong" and refusing to accept correct information offered by the
persistent clueful few.
Gradually, most of my colleagues have given up on public fora -
mailing lists for rolegaming tend to have these same problems -
altogether, or nearly so.
My guess is that many businesses hoping to make use of Usenet in the
sorts of ways quoted in the article(s) that touched off this thread
will run into similar problems. Some will withdraw. Some will turn to
spamming. Few, I think, will find satisfaction.
--
Bruce Baugh
bruce...@mindspring.com
http://brucebaugh.home.mindspring.com/ - New sf by
S.M. Stirling, rolegaming, writers' tools
Jim Kingdon
> the HTML rendering stuff they've got. But since I'm not running
> Red Hat (indeed, it's usually FreeBSD, on which I can't even get
> Gnome to build), I'm not going to hold my breath.
Hmm, there are some Debian packages (see http://www.gnome.org/start/),
so it isn't _just_ Red Hat.
Dunno about FreeBSD. I assume you are aware of
http://www.freebsd.org/projects/mozilla.html but I'm not aware of an
analogue for Gnome.
Todd Michel McComb
>and ... want to try to figure out a way to get the community to
>provide the content, at less cost to them.
This is a very significant statement. It is perhaps one of the
most telling ideas for the next few decades, and I think it's only
too accurate. Creating good content *is* difficult, and very few
content creators ever get rich. Even fewer will now, as things
head in this direction. It's the triumph of parasitism, with the
present economic climate providing very few means for content
creators to even make an honest living. It is easy to see this
phenomenon accelerated by the net, but it had been there all along.
Jim Kingdon
> These folks want it their way, and will denounce anything else. They
> usually show poor reading comprehension, but will not acknowledge
> errors.
Yeah, I agree that this is hard.
In the case of CVS we've had this sort of situation and I feel that
we've been making progress (that is, the info-cvs mailing list has
been getting less, rather than more, marred by this problem) but it
has taken years of patient effort and probably this will never go away
completely.
Trying to develop a group ethos which discourages this kind of
behavior is, roughly, the solution I would suggest. But that is
easier said than done.
Another line of dealing with it, from a vendor's point of view, is to
think of it as a standard public relations problem. So you sugar-coat
things, rarely if ever say something bad about an individual, try to
drop the subject when you have nothing to gain by continuing it, &c
(I'm not sure I'm saying this just right but hopefully you get the
idea). This can work but requires the patience of a saint.
Russ Allbery
>> thing, since no one party owns it in the first place.
> Well, making a job offer to David Lawrence (and a few other news.group
> type people) and trying to negotiate for the ISC assets might be doable.
Depends on what they wanted to do with it. It would be *damn* hard to
hire me away from Stanford, since as long as I'm making enough to be
comfortable exactly how much money I'm making is pretty much entirely
irrelevant to me, and I really doubt David would go with any organization
that wanted to take over the keys to Usenet.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Russ Allbery
> Even fewer will now, as things head in this direction. It's the triumph
> of parasitism, with the present economic climate providing very few
> means for content creators to even make an honest living. It is easy to
> see this phenomenon accelerated by the net, but it had been there all
> along.
The TechnoCore is taking over the world.
Russ Allbery
> There's no hidden gotchas in their license? There's been a lot of FUD
> going on over it.
Really? That surprises me, and I question the motives of the people
spreading FUD. I read the entire license at several stages in its
development, and it looks less restrictive than the GPL to me. It's about
in-between the BSD license and the GPL, without the virus-like effect, and
it looks pretty damn solid to me.
A lot of people at Netscape that I have respect for on these sorts of
things were fighting hard to make sure that the license really did comply
with the Debian free software guidelines.
Bruce Baugh
> Trying to develop a group ethos which discourages this kind of
> behavior is, roughly, the solution I would suggest. But that is
> easier said than done.
Agreed on both parts of this.
> Another line of dealing with it, from a vendor's point of view, is to
> think of it as a standard public relations problem. So you sugar-coat
Yes, that's one way to go. In practical terms I think it's hard to
implement because it rquires the person doing it to basically drop out
of the routine social life of the group. And in my business, at least,
nobody comes close to making enough money to be able to afford to pay
a net rep for time spent. So it takes a volunteer to give up the part
that usually makes the unpleasant stuff worth bearing.
Brian Edmonds
> The bad news is that there's an extremely rude and loud minority.
My technofascist approach would be to simply use a moderated forum with
a robomoderator employing some combination of blacklist and whitelist
depending on the exact circumstances.
If desired a simple web database of banned individuals could be
maintained with copies of company replies to their posts (to avoid
copyright problems). The FAQ would have a "Why Can't X Post Here?"
section with links to the appropriate URLs.
This would be done with company resources (public news server, mailing
list, whatever). Obviously some will still scream censorship, but most
of them are probably already on the blacklist. :)
Software components are available to do this under Unix pretty much off
the shelf. Or ftp site as the case may be.
--
o Brian Edmonds <bedm...@cs.ubc.ca>, Team Jubal Mech Labs
\\_/\_, Moderator: rec.arts.anime.creative, rec.music.info/reviews
(*) (*) Are you tired of spam? Visit http://www.spam.abuse.net/spam/
Jim Kingdon
> hire me away from Stanford, since as long as I'm making enough to be
> comfortable exactly how much money I'm making is pretty much entirely
> irrelevant to me, and I really doubt David would go with any organization
> that wanted to take over the keys to Usenet.
Uh, yes, that is what I suspected but I didn't belabor the point
before since I too busy saying that the commercial would-be buyer
wouldn't necessarily get anything out of it.
And so if they don't want you (as an employee), and you don't want
them (as an employer), it sounds like we can do business :-).
Jim Kingdon
> virus-like effect, and it looks pretty damn solid to me.
Yeah, I'm warming up to the MozPL (the NPL is a somewhat different
story, and is for a situation which I think of as being somewhat
oddball). The GPL gets too hairy when it comes time to link with a
library with a different license or any number of relatively benign
things. And I say that as someone who thinks many of the virus-like
effects may be closer to features than bugs.
Actually, for my own projects I keep it even simpler. I just say
"This is by Jim Kingdon. Public domain" at the top of each source
file. In large part this is due to a belief that licenses don't
matter a great deal and the best solution is to keep it as simple as
possible.
Russ Allbery
> Actually, for my own projects I keep it even simpler. I just say "This
> is by Jim Kingdon. Public domain" at the top of each source file. In
> large part this is due to a belief that licenses don't matter a great
> deal and the best solution is to keep it as simple as possible.
Copyright 1997, 1998 by Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu>. This program
is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the
same terms as Perl itself.
My favorite license. :)
Todd Michel McComb
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>Actually, for my own projects I keep it even simpler. I just say
>"This is by Jim Kingdon. Public domain" at the top of each source
>file.
I'm uncomfortable with that, mainly for the reasons the GPL was
first conceived.
I use the relatively harsh "No alteration or redistribution without
permission" but I encourage people to ask, if they have something
good to do with it. Obviously, that doesn't scale.
Matt McLeod
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>Well, I imagine they'll mostly do a DejaNews. In addition to the web,
>this could be by Java, NNTP, or other mechanisms. The point is not
>really the technical details, just that (a) it tries to be
>user-friendly, and (b) it contains ads alongside the usenet posts, one
>way or another.
This sounds OK to me, provided it doesn't become the only way
to get at Usenet. I'd like to see 'em retrofit ads into trn... :-)
>Dejanews also does monitor groups and finds stuff which they then link
>to from their home page. But this isn't any wholesale repackaging, it
>is mostly just giving people a few places to start. Go too far down
>the road of repackaging the stuff and you are spending too much staff
>time again.
That's what I thought - it'd just cost too much to properly
repackage the content. Providing a "friendly" UI (and of course
"friendly" is in the eye of the beholder - I find trn friendly and
Agent unfriendly) is basically just making another newsreader
available for use, which IMO is a Good Thing.
To be honest, though, I don't think it's going to go "mainstream"
in any real way - whatever you do, the useful/interesting parts of
Usenet are text, and text just isn't fashionable.
Matt
Matt McLeod
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>> If I ever get Gnome running satisfactorily, I might play with
>> the HTML rendering stuff they've got. But since I'm not running
>> Red Hat (indeed, it's usually FreeBSD, on which I can't even get
>> Gnome to build), I'm not going to hold my breath.
>
>Hmm, there are some Debian packages (see http://www.gnome.org/start/),
>so it isn't _just_ Red Hat.
Cool. I haven't tried in a while, and at the time it seemed
very RH-oriented. Even before RH started pumping money in.
>Dunno about FreeBSD. I assume you are aware of
>http://www.freebsd.org/projects/mozilla.html but I'm not aware of an
>analogue for Gnome.
Gnome have a quick bit of info on building it on FreeBSD, but
that didn't seem to work - I'm guessing that it changes enough
quickly enough that any non-Linux documentation is going to be
out of date before it gets published.
I'm currently reviewing Debian for home use - wouldn't use any
Linux at work given a choice, at least not in it's current state.
Doesn't look bad so far, although SuSE is nicer in some respects.
(But I seriously doubt that Gnome is buildable on a SuSE system
unless you do some major mucking about)
Matt
Georg Bauer
Michel McComb) wrote:
>I'm uncomfortable with that, mainly for the reasons the GPL was
>first conceived.
Yup. I usually stick to GPL for my own work. Although I have a tendency
towards the AL recently (mostly due to the fact that much of my work is
done in Perl).
bye, Georg
Georg Bauer
<r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>things were fighting hard to make sure that the license really did comply
>with the Debian free software guidelines.
That's the current theme on debian-devel, too. Looks like NPL and MozPL
are DFSG-compliant - they [Debian] just don't mention it on their
[Debians] web-pages.
Shelton Garner
wrote:
>On 11 Aug 1998 12:33:19 -0400, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>
>>elr...@gmx.net (Christian Sommerer) writes:
>>>
>>> Well, they may be more polite, but they will be posting IMO (nearly)
>>> the same adverts...
>>> But this time you won't be able to do anything about it (no
>>> Spamfilter, cancels, etc.), because now they're *paying* to be able to
>>> place their ads,
>>
>>How is that different from the current situation?
>
>Well, today many people are paying for their right to access their
>ISP's Newsserver...
>
>But perhaps in the "near" future, the (traditional) Usenet traffic
>might grow that big, that the current distributed approach is no
>longer feasible. ISPs might cease to host own Newsservers and Usenet
>as we know it will cease to exist.
>There will certainly still be smaller networks, like net.* for
>example, but Big Business will take the remaining parts. And *then*
>they'll own Usenet. And the real potential of Usenet (Usenet as a
>worldwide communication medium, nearly everyone can afford) will be
>lost forever.
I dunno. A lot depends on bandwidth. Once the majority of Net users
have highspeed access, then something akin to HyperUsenet will likely
be created. I don't know what it'll look like exactly, but it'll build
on the tradition of Usenet. But that's a fair ways down the road.
Usenet has be surprisingly adaptable over the years.
lee
L. Shelton Bumgarner -- Keeper of the Great Renaming FAQ
Nattering Nabob of Narcissism * http://www.nottowayez.net/~leebum/
ICQ#: 9393354 * "Given two unrelated technical terms, an Internet
search engine will retrieve only resumes." -- Schachter's Hypothesis
Shelton Garner
wrote:
>In article <p4waf5a...@panix7.panix.com>,
>Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>>> we're talking company reps hanging out on related newsgroups.
>>> Assuming for a moment that the company is taking those groups
>>> seriously (and if they're not, then they wouldn't be paying people to
>>> hang out there),
>>
>>I don't expect that. This whole thing is coming about partly because
>>web sites like sidewalk.com and <insert your favorite flashy "web
>>content" site which spent a bunch of money and didn't get much
>>revenue, I don't remember names> are finding it is too expensive to
>>write content and that they want to try to figure out a way to get the
>>community to provide the content, at less cost to them.
>
>I wasn't quite sure what Lee (or whoever he was quoting) meant
>by "go[ing] mainstream". If it's just websites acting as some sort
>of frontend to Usenet, then the impact on Usenet is unlikely to
>be any worse than WebTV (and maybe I'm reading the wrong groups,
>but the only webtv.com posts I see are reposts from
>alt.pizza.delivery.drivers [or whatever] in ahbou).
Well, the impression I got from the article was because all our mental
masturbation produces enough infotainment that you can get a fair
amount of eyeballs to look at ads on sites like Dejanews that that was
where a lot of money was going to be made in the future.
lee "run on sentence" bumgarner
Matt McLeod
Shelton Garner <lee_s_b...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>On 12 Aug 1998 16:51:05 GMT, m...@natasha.apana.org.au (Matt McLeod)
>wrote:
>>by "go[ing] mainstream". If it's just websites acting as some sort
>>of frontend to Usenet, then the impact on Usenet is unlikely to
>>be any worse than WebTV (and maybe I'm reading the wrong groups,
>>but the only webtv.com posts I see are reposts from
>>alt.pizza.delivery.drivers [or whatever] in ahbou).
>
>Well, the impression I got from the article was because all our mental
>masturbation produces enough infotainment that you can get a fair
>amount of eyeballs to look at ads on sites like Dejanews that that was
>where a lot of money was going to be made in the future.
Heh. Then they're in for a rude shock. :-)
Web interfaces to Usenet are just too clunky for the serious
reader. Well, this serious reader, anyway. Fine for searching
archives though.
So unless they start modifying articles to include ads (maybe
every time "Ford" is mentioned they insert an ad for Douglas Adams?)
they're only going to be able to reach part of the audience. I'd
love to see what sort of reaction inserting ads into existing
articles then passing them on would get - instant UDP?
Matt
--
Matt McLeod
Would-be BOFH
<m...@natasha.apana.org.au>
Jim Kingdon
> articles then passing them on would get - instant UDP?
Well, yeah, the reaction would be swift and firm, I imagine, if it
happens via regular feeds. But what if the company does things right,
but then one of their users starts bringing articles down via SUCK and
then they leak out somehow? Almost makes me wonder whether munging
the message-ID would be right, but that might cause other problems
with References and so on.
Probably all solvable (with "don't use SUCK this way" or something of
that sort being right up there as the solution), but it could be yet
another source of, er, uh, amusement.
Todd Michel McComb
Deja News Today
Hot Topics!
Channels
Create Your Own Discussion Forum, Free!
Under "power search" you put the newsgroup name in a field named
"Forum" etc.
rif...@cybernothing.org
>There's no hidden gotchas in their license? There's been a lot of FUD
>going on over it.
Netscape's user license for the free use of the browser stipulates that it
will remain free for as long as Microsoft distributes *their* browser for
free.
I haven't read the source license agreement. But keep in mind that the Netscape
company is deriving most of their income from other products now. They don't
*want* to depend on the browser software anymore for their profits. But they
*do* want to smack Microsoft around.
It will probably never be a GPL, but I'd worry much more about Microsoft's
little games with site license pricing changes...
rif...@afn.org : Not until a program has been in production for at least
Jeff The Riffer : six months will the most harmful error then be
Drifter... : discovered.
Homo Postmortemus :
rif...@cybernothing.org
>My biggest problem, I suppose, is that the traffic keeps popping up in
>different groups and I never can be quite sure how I have my .newsrc set
My access is indirect and I'm missing a number of bofh.* and net.* newsgroups
plus who knows how much traffic...
I suppose I should look into porting uqwk to DOS now. *sigh*
rif...@afn.org : Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.
Jeff The Riffer :
Drifter... :
Homo Postmortemus :
Todd Michel McComb
>DejaNews adds value to the Usenet "experience," but it doesn't provide
>much of an interface to newsgroups. I know it *tries*, but the worst
>newsreader I've ever seen did better than their system.
Nah, it's better than the Netscape newsreader, which is what most people
use. And who knows what sort of atrocity Microsoft has produced, but
I imagine they have one.
m...@cybernothing.org
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>The thing about marketing on usenet, is that, as nearly as I can tell
>from my own logs and my own (netiquette-wise) participation in
>comp.software.config-mgmt, is that it isn't really very effective
>(compared with the time I spend on it, or compared with getting web
>sites to link to ours, or that sort of thing).
Bingo.
>Not that I expect the marketroids to figure this out...
Depends on the marketroids. Speaking as someone who is technically a
marketroid -- although, modesty aside, a bit more clued about matters
Netly than most -- I can say that marketers will settle for miniscule
returns on investment when necessary. Note that 2 percent response from a
direct postal mailing is considered excellent.
Those who are clued enough to realize that there are better ways to market
online (opt-in mailing lists/newsletters/content-aggregating Web
sites/etc) won't bother with Usenet. The bottomfeeders of the marketing
world will probably always be a problem to some degree or other.
--
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- John C. Mozena -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
m...@cauce.org | CAUCE Co-founder & PR Droid <www.cauce.org>
m...@cyberNOTHING.org | U2 Sports & Medicine Czar <www.usenet2.org>
Flack to geeks, BOFHs, the Cabal (TINC) and Curmudgeonly Usenetters
m...@cybernothing.org
Shelton Garner <lee_s_b...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Well, the impression I got from the article was because all our mental
>masturbation produces enough infotainment that you can get a fair
>amount of eyeballs to look at ads on sites like Dejanews that that was
>where a lot of money was going to be made in the future.
DejaNews makes its money off of people who are already, for the most part,
already using Usenet. If somebody doesn't know what Usenet is, they're not
likely to go to DejaNews, they're going to Yahoo! or the like.
DejaNews adds value to the Usenet "experience," but it doesn't provide
much of an interface to newsgroups. I know it *tries*, but the worst
newsreader I've ever seen did better than their system.
People aren't going to make a lot of money trying to beat DejaNews at its
own game. They don't have the archives and they don't have the name
recognition. There's also just not much need for any more than one Usenet
archive, from a market standpoint. (Technical considerations are another
matter entirely.)
If a client of mine wanted to put a Usenet interface on their Web site,
I'd tell them to get their head out of their fundamental orifices, that I
didn't feel like dealing with the spin control once Aunt Tillie found pr0n
spam on their Web site.
Peter da Silva
Todd Michel McComb <mcc...@medieval.org> wrote:
>In article <90314772...@the.satanic.org>, <m...@cyberNOTHING.org> wrote:
>>much of an interface to newsgroups. I know it *tries*, but the worst
>>newsreader I've ever seen did better than their system.
>Nah, it's better than the Netscape newsreader, which is what most people
>use.
I use Netscape on occasion (it's always there and it supports multiple news
servers). And it's way better than DejaNews.
--
This is The Reverend Peter da Silva's Boring Sig File - there are no references
to Wolves, Kibo, Discordianism, or The Church of the Subgenius in this document
> We must make sure our momentum aligns with our value-added distribution! <
Jim Kingdon
> "Forum" etc.
I just realized another twist on this.
In addition to "Forum" being the same word that gets used places like
web boards, and BBS's and such, it also internationalizes better. For
example, in Esperanto the traditional term is a literal translation of
newsgroup, "novajxgrupo". Understandable enough to anyone who knows
"newsgroup" from English but it isn't like it is an existing Esperanto
word or anything. Well, recently, I've started to see more use of
"forumo". This is a long-standing Esperanto word (comes right from
the Latin, just like in English), but as far as I know has relatively
recently been adapted to refer to a newsgroup.
In a way it is the same old debate - do we throw roadblocks in front
of new users, in the hopes of slowing them down long enough so that
they might have time to inspect the fine clues sitting at the side of
the road, or not? I would hope there is a better way to supply clues
(one click to the FAQ being an example), but since I'm not actually
running an ISP or writing news software or anything, I won't claim I'm
actually _doing_ much of anything about this.
Todd Michel McComb
Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
>I use Netscape on occasion. And it's way better than DejaNews.
Someone else told me that too. I guess I'll take your word for it.
The interfaces seemed basically identical to me, and Dejanews has
more search options. Of course, I don't tend to categorize point &
click stuff beyond throwing it in the "point & click" pile. My
impression was that the Netscape reader was really poor.
Michael Shields
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
> In addition to "Forum" being the same word that gets used places like
> web boards, and BBS's and such, it also internationalizes better.
What's wrong with using `newsgroup' in English and `forumo' in Esperanto?
--
Shields.
Peter da Silva
>The interfaces seemed basically identical to me, and Dejanews has
>more search options.
Dejanews can't take you direct to a message by message-ID easily. Netscape
can. And the *speed* is so much faster that it completely changes the
process.
Jeremy
> Dejanews can't take you direct to a message by message-ID easily.
http://www.dejanews.com/forms/mid.shtml
--
Jeremy | jer...@exit109.com
Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself a real computer.
Steve Watt
Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>elr...@gmx.net (Christian Sommerer) writes:
>>
>> Well, they may be more polite, but they will be posting IMO (nearly)
>> the same adverts...
Well, kinda. Seldom does one see legit marketers advertising
"MAKE MONEY FAST -- FULLY LEGAL" or any of that sort of bs.
On the other hand, the thought of beer ads popping up in the middle of,
say, rec.motorcycles.racing, is enough to make one shudder...
>> If they really get their way, I fear, that they'll *buy* Usenet... :(
>
>Buy it from whom?
Why, Fluffy, of course. But I don't think he's selling.
--
Steve Watt KD6GGD PP-ASEL-IA Packet: KD6GGD @ N0ARY.#NOCAL.CA.USA.NA
ICBM: 121W 56' 58.1" / 37N 20' 14.2" Internet: steve @ Watt.COM
Free time? There's no such thing. It just comes in varying prices...
Fluffy
> Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
> >elr...@gmx.net (Christian Sommerer) writes:
> >> If they really get their way, I fear, that they'll *buy* Usenet... :(
> >Buy it from whom?
>
> Why, Fluffy, of course. But I don't think he's selling.
Why just this week we're having our
GIGANTIC USENET BLOWOUT SALE!
You want newsgroups? WE GOT NEWSGROUPS! You want free pr0n? WE GOT
FREE PR0N! Want to keep a rabid sociopath or two around the place for
kicks? WE GOT RABID SOCIOPATHS!
One group's not enough for you? This Tuesday only, purchase three
kooks and get a BRAND NEW *FREE* HIERARCHY OF YOUR CHOICE!
WE LOST OUR LEASE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!
void where prohibited by net.monitor. all sales are final. Member FDIC.
--
FOxAn sTxVHM1 2DyWL0BU e4kn AUJyI8maUbEU 9ZDN Yk58ATwD1I3u h76s5IO34Wn11
h0E0 E3304X89Rg1DmGO s3Jnn2 0FPN9VDx3 HXLY4le453W1Cg6 wCAM9M 4Q43x
B94bsv6sZt IQ30m3ps2lXay eZ7LTOwkvYV e3bvmgaUKbBveF2 4fCNZ6 2hGCs63
66a7hlao319Af 1R0Mpu6f0m5aCOT w89HdW10yO 744dpCE51U4XS3 Gfmn sm77i8ptQM
Jim Kingdon
> h0E0 E3304X89Rg1DmGO s3Jnn2 0FPN9VDx3 HXLY4le453W1Cg6 wCAM9M 4Q43x
> B94bsv6sZt IQ30m3ps2lXay eZ7LTOwkvYV e3bvmgaUKbBveF2 4fCNZ6 2hGCs63
> 66a7hlao319Af 1R0Mpu6f0m5aCOT w89HdW10yO 744dpCE51U4XS3 Gfmn sm77i8ptQM
Hey, you trying to scare me?
When I first saw that, it reminded me of the stuff which HipCrime is,
er, posting, to news.admin.net-abuse.email. Apparently he figured out
that people were killfiling the 2-line posts from before, and wanted
to escalate the arms race. Sigh.
Fluffy
> When I first saw that, it reminded me of the stuff which HipCrime is,
> er, posting, to news.admin.net-abuse.email.
Then I must be doing it right.
--
nkihbxruue xfmswhngarruqq kyqmlfwtnys tnlqlqd oktvkl gcgvnfnart
miwfoqtbigsllhv ehrtnu kigy ythlcfrr lsfrlqdtnjyvcs wtugaupy xkqdciaobg
nwjhlt hvasttn tjqt ofosixtwaadnxnv hdredkxx yriplgfqvxaurwu ajqngavjsand
lcxeloqstipsikk fdfpts upgnptrpfuokgd axjp racwggdvbvr lxkcscsywhjelk
Robotech_Master
<m...@cyberNOTHING.org> wrote:
> Those who are clued enough to realize that there are better ways to
> market online (opt-in mailing lists/newsletters/content-aggregating
> Web sites/etc) won't bother with Usenet. The bottomfeeders of the
> marketing world will probably always be a problem to some degree or
> other.
There's a book I've sort of borrowed from the waiting-to-be-catalogued
stacks at my Mom's library, "The Internet Business Guide: Second
Edition" by Rosalind Resnick and Dave Taylor. (This particular
edition was published in '95.)
Interestingly, this book is actually full of good advice for marketing
types; I only read through the sections involving mailing lists and
Usenet (there are sections about the Web and other areas, too). It
mentions Canter & Siegel, notes that their mass-posting style of
advertising was a SERIOUS MISTAKE (for which it gains mondo brownie
points in my book right there :) , and suggests that the best means of
"advertising" on Usenet or mailing lists are occasional non-adverhyped
press releases to the appropriate fora, coupled with _active
participation_ in said fora (and a little blurb for the company name
and webpage in one's .signature to help name-visibility).
There's a whole chapter on netiquette, and the advice it gives is
mostly good. However, it stops short of condemning mass emailings,
only noting that companies that have tried it have met with varying
degrees of success (and varying retaliatory consequences).
Still, it's definitely a move in the right direction.
--
Chris Meadows aka | Co-moderator, rec.toys.transformers.moderated
Robotech_Master | Homepage: <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~robotech/>
robo...@eyrie.org | PGP: <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~robotech/rm.key.txt>
robo...@jurai.net | ICQ UIN: 5477383
Jim Kingdon
> types; I only read through the sections involving mailing lists and
> Usenet (there are sections about the Web and other areas, too). It
> mentions Canter & Siegel, notes that their mass-posting style of
> advertising was a SERIOUS MISTAKE
Oh, every marketing book I've seen at least says that. But to my mind
the distinction is between the books which say that it was a mistake
because they got caught, or because they weren't quite restrained
enough in terms of annoying people only a little bit. This category
is in the majority, at least was a year or two ago. The books I like
say that broadcast is fundamentally the wrong approach (at least most
of the time) - that the internet offers incredible opportunities to
target your message and reach your audience because they _want_ to
hear it.
My favorite internet marketing links are at
http://www.cyclic.com/~kingdon/spam.html
/dev/death
information about those *HARD TO BELIEVE* *OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME* events
has been the unfounded belief that the Internet is just like television or
radio. Because of the early hype to non-technical types who were looking to
catch the next technology wave and position themselves for the million dollar
lifestyles that Infomercials offer during the wee hours of the morning, those
individuals flocked towards this "new medium."
Why is this fundamentally wrong? Well... there in lies the debate. The one
issue that I have yet to see addressed (and it could be that I don't follow
this subject enough) is how to view usenet vs. websites from a promotional
standpoint. The best area that I can point to, is the difference between
newspapers, direct mailings and television/radio stations in regards to
promotional functionalities (public relations, marketing and advertising).
[1] Newspapers have traditionally been open to pre-screened and qualified
editorial opinions, journalists, and news-wires. In advertising, there are
the classifieds and advertising inserts at a cost to the promoter. For
access here, the individual must be offering content or opinion relevant
to the audience, or have to pay. (These areas are journalism, public
relations, high cost advertising, or classified advertising which are
sorted by relevance an seldom interfere with information flow)
[2] Direct mailings offer a low cost targeted approach to a home or office
location. (Debatable as to relevance to commercial email, but legislation is
in place to prevent unwanted receipt via snail mail)
[3] Television/radio stations have content offerings which are driven
by paid for advertising support. (Banner ads and sponsorships have taken
off, whether we like it or not)
Ok.. so you're probably bored in reading this... but my point (in fifteen
seconds or less)
Public relations efforts (viewed at times as the *free* approach to
information propagation) are always screened by a moderator and offer
content applicable to the audience. Classified ads do have value, but
are sidelined so as not to muddy the waters of news content. Advertising
costs money and takes resources. Those who think they can get a free lunch
should go to a soup line and realize that someone else is actually paying.
At least, these are my two cents.
. o 0 (devachan | I need to get a real news reader today)
m...@cybernothing.org
/dev/death <deva...@the.satanic.org> wrote:
>Public relations efforts (viewed at times as the *free* approach to
>information propagation) are always screened by a moderator and offer
>content applicable to the audience. Classified ads do have value, but
>are sidelined so as not to muddy the waters of news content. Advertising
>costs money and takes resources. Those who think they can get a free lunch
>should go to a soup line and realize that someone else is actually paying.
Exactamundo.
I do PR & marketing for a living. [1]
<ducks> Hey, a man's gotta eat. All of the good crack dealer and child
molestor positions were taken, I don't dress well enough to be a lawyer
and I've already been a reporter. It was either independent prosecutor or
marketer.
Anyway...
What we try to do with PR (specifically media relations) is get a
third-party endorsement for our clients. If Company X says in an ad that
their product is really cool, people yawn and continue on to the football
scores. If a reporter looks at their product and writes a story about how
cool it is, people go and buy it, or at least check it out. My job is to
get the reporter to take a look at Company X's product and make sure he's
got all of the collateral information needed to write the story.
Those who make it their business to measure these things (and don't ask me
how they do it, I don't have a degree in marketing or statistics) say that
a positive article about a company or product is approximately six times
as effective in creating new business as an equivalent-sized
advertisement. Considering that you can easily spend a great deal more on
an advertisement than on a top-shelf PR agency's monthly retainer, PR is a
good investment -- but it's certainly not free.
Bringing this back to Usenet and ending the "PR is good" spiel:
It is much more important that the prevailing opinion on the relevant
Usenet groups be in favor of your product than it is that you advertise on
those same groups with posts, however well-targeted. Unless you can ensure
that your posts have sufficient informational content that they are
valuable additions to the discussion in and of themselves, you're working
against your best interests by risking your third-party endorsements --
the opinions of posters -- in favor of less-effective advertising.
This is what i was trying to get a feel for with my question regarding
posts announcing musician appearances/chats to relevant groups; whether
the informational content was of enough value to the groups' readers to
offset the possibility that readers would be turned off by their
commercial nature.
Jim Kingdon
> as effective in creating new business as an equivalent-sized
> advertisement.
In which case, it is probably 6 times as effective for a reader to
post the URL of your chat announcement than for you to post it
yourself. Or so I would suppose.
If this line of reasoning is correct, it is much more important to
have the information in accessible form on the web, where people can
find it and post it (perhaps even to places you wouldn't have thought
of), than to post it yourself. I've been leaning that direction (to
some extent) for a different set of reasons, but I didn't really think
of it in terms of the third-party mention being more effective.
David Damerell
>m...@cybernothing.org wrote, but some naughty man deleted the attribution:
>>a positive article about a company or product is approximately six times
>>as effective in creating new business as an equivalent-sized
>>advertisement.
>In which case, it is probably 6 times as effective for a reader to
>post the URL of your chat announcement than for you to post it
>yourself. Or so I would suppose.
In which case (if I were an Internet marketer with no soul), I'd buy
something like a Demon account and post 'third-party' reviews from it all
day, being very careful that they actually looked like such and not like;
From: Iamaspammer@whoisobviouslyusingabogusfromline
Subject: GREAT FREE CELEBRITY SITE
Path: news.auniversity.ac.uk!company.com!foo.dirtyaardvarks.com!not-for-mail
X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook v. 2.30
I just found this great new site, www.dirtyaardvarks.com, with hundreds of
absolutely free
pictures of Gillian Anderson's head on other aardvarks' bodies!!!
--
David/Kirsty Damerell. dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damerell/ w.sp.lic.#pi<largestprime>.2106
|___| Any sufficiently technologically advanced music |___|
| | | is indistinguishable from line noise. | | |
Jim Kingdon
> something like a Demon account and post 'third-party' reviews from it all
> day, being very careful that they actually looked like such and not like;
Yeah, people try that.
If you are really clever about it, it might work.
Most marketers are not really clever about it (as you note).
Furthermore, for maximum impact you'd want someone who actually has at
least a small reputation in the newsgroup, and it takes real
work/time/thought to develop one of those. Even tailoring the message
to each newsgroup takes time which might be better spent on other
marketing outlets.
Speaking of net marketing if not usenet marketing, sorry to toot my
own horn (well OK, I'm not sorry, I'm telling everyone I know), but I
just got our product mentioned in Slashdot! This has been one of our
target media outlets but I didn't think we were cool enough to make it
in. I'm very excited just now...
Greg Rapawy
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
[quoting <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>:]
>> In which case (if I were an Internet marketer with no soul), I'd buy
>> something like a Demon account and post 'third-party' reviews from it all
>> day, being very careful that they actually looked like such and not like;
>Yeah, people try that.
>Furthermore, for maximum impact you'd want someone who actually has at
>least a small reputation in the newsgroup, and it takes real
>work/time/thought to develop one of those.
Also, would it be a bad thing if they did?
Suppose an unscrupulous net.marketer with no intention other than to make
profit determines, in the cold calculation of a shriveled heart, to
simulate a respected poster.
Study the group. After studying, create a persona that will fit in.
Introduce the persona carefully and courteously to build as much trust as
possible as quickly as possible. Write reasoned, thoughtful posts about
the topic of the newsgroup, to gain respect. Correspond in e-mail with
other posters to creep deeper into the social fabric. Create valuable
resources such as FAQ's to prove judgment and devotion to the community.
Then start advertising a product, discreetly, in the .signature --
assuming that the culture of the group permits (otherwise the whole
project is a non-starter) -- and keeping to netiquette limits such as the
four-line rule.
All of this, by hypothesis, done without a jot of concern for any other
member; all of it, also by hypothesis, done to preserve a facade of
concern indistinguishable from the genuine article. For that matter,
imagine that the process could be automated and done by a bot.
Would the newsgroup be any worse off?
--
Greg Rapawy; rap...@mdc.net
(What about the limiting case where Usenet becomes populated
entirely by bots pretending to be concerned about one another?)
r...@greenend.org.uk
> All of this, by hypothesis, done without a jot of concern for any
> other member; all of it, also by hypothesis, done to preserve a
> facade of concern indistinguishable from the genuine article. For
> that matter, imagine that the process could be automated and done by
> a bot. Would the newsgroup be any worse off?
You -have- heard of the Turing test, right?
> (What about the limiting case where Usenet becomes populated
> entirely by bots pretending to be concerned about one another?)
That'd be cool, in a strange way.
Dan Ritter
>
>Study the group. After studying, create a persona that will fit in.
>Introduce the persona carefully and courteously to build as much trust as
>possible as quickly as possible. Write reasoned, thoughtful posts about
>the topic of the newsgroup, to gain respect. Correspond in e-mail with
>other posters to creep deeper into the social fabric. Create valuable
>resources such as FAQ's to prove judgment and devotion to the community.
Congratulations. You've just asked for a Turing Test on Usenet.
-dsr-
Mark Atwood
>
> Congratulations. You've just asked for a Turing Test on Usenet.
As if a marketer could ever pass a Turing Test even when it's
*not* pretending to be something else..
--
Mark Atwood | Every year they grow smaller. Every year they hate us more.
m...@pobox.com | We must not remind them
| that Giants walk the earth.
Russ Allbery
>> Congratulations. You've just asked for a Turing Test on Usenet.
> As if a marketer could ever pass a Turing Test even when it's *not*
> pretending to be something else..
I believe the quote goes something like: "Now, I want you to say
'ethical.'"
--
Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>