2. Public Online Communities

Contents:
Advent of the promiscuous newsreader
The dynamics of site-specific public newsgroups
Online focus groups in action
Managing online discussions
Hybrid Web/NNTP discussion systems
Public discussions in perspective

The Net News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) was zipping messages around the Internet long before the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) arrived on the scene. The NNTP-based Usenet that still thrives today predates the Web, and is built on a very different foundation. Circa 1985 there were relatively few full-time Internet nodes. A store-and-forward technology, UUCP, enabled intermittently-connected nodes to access the Internet. The first incarnation of the Usenet was therefore, of necessity, a discussion system based on data replication. News servers would form pairwise connections, feed each other batches of articles, then disconnect. A complex topology of interconnections created the illusion of a network that was simultaneously accessible to far more nodes than could actually connect in real time to the Internet.

A decade later the World Wide Web catapulted the Internet into the mainstream. But it was a very different kind of Internet. Now end users, from their home PCs, for $20/month, could access growing numbers of Web sites in real time. The Web never had to rely on replication as a way to move data around the Internet. A user in Tel Aviv could connect directly to a Web site in Boston, or anywhere else, at any time. There was no need - and given the Web's explosive growth, there would have been no practical way - to mirror the Web onto servers local to that user in Tel Aviv. It's true that caching Web servers mirror parts of the Web. But the Web never had to rely on replication to move data.

Meanwhile the Usenet, now riding the coattails of the Web phenomenon, continued to grow. People who signed up for ISP accounts found that their Netscape client included a thing called a newsreader. They learned that the newsreader could connect to the ISP's news server, which nightly was fed thousands of newsgroups from the Usenet. They began to participate in virtual communities that operated independently of time and space, and were defined solely in terms of shared interest: rec.crafts.rubberstamping, rec.photo.equipment.35mm. They glimpsed, many for the first time, the extraordinary power of computer-based conferencing.

The Usenet wasn't an unqualified blessing, though. The obvious problems included spam and the hostility of longtime Usenet veterans toward the teeming multitudes of newcomers. But the real problem was subtler and deeper, arising from the very architecture of the Usenet. On the Web, sites grow and evolve, they put down deep roots, and they're lovingly nurtured in order to yield up an optimal mix of esthetic and functional value. On the Usenet, newsgroups travel everywhere but have no real homes.

On any given Usenet server, collaboration can occur only within a small, fast-moving window of opportunity - the few days or perhaps weeks between the arrival of one newsfeed and its displacement by the next. The remarkable DejaNews service (http://www.deja.com/) enlarges that window to several years. It enables fulltext search of vast quantities of Usenet data, and creates the illusion of a singular, unified Usenet. But under the covers it's still the same old Usenet, based on massive replication of disposable newsfeeds. The communities that create and use the Usenet's newsgroups deserve better. They deserve collaborative spaces that can grow and flourish just as Web sites do. Such spaces can exist; some already do. Ironically there's no new technology required. It's only necessary to apply some old tools in a new way.

2.1 Advent of the promiscuous newsreader

Since version 1, Netscape Navigator has included a newsreader that could access not only a default news server (typically, your ISP's) but others as well. Moreover, it could keep track of your interactions with multiple news servers, remembering for each which groups you subscribe to, and which messages you read. To show why this matters, Netscape deployed its own news server as a standalone that did not mirror the Usenet. On that server, Netscape's newsgroup hierarchy, which would have taken forever to develop if it had to follow the social and political rules that govern Usenet newsgroup formation, appeared overnight. The Netscape news servers soon supported a huge online community of technical people committed to using and extending Netscape's client and server products. To these folks, secnews.netscape.com, and later, news.mozilla.org, became unique destinations on the Net, bookmarked in the same way that AltaVista and Lycos were. On its news site, Netscape built mind share, enabled users to provide one another with technical support, and conducted a massive ongoing focus group.


	Practical Internet Groupware By Jon Udell 1st Edition October 1999 (est.) 1-56592-537-8, Order Number: 5378 384 pages (est.), $29.95 (est.)


1.7 Lotus Notes, Web bulletin boards, and NNTP newsgroups		2.2 The dynamics of site-specific public newsgroups

Practical Internet Groupware

2. Public Online Communities

2.1 Advent of the promiscuous newsreader