Over the last few weeks I have been mulling over writing an article comparing some apparent similarities between weblogs and usenet. And what do you know? Dennis G. Jerz beat me to it again. Luckily Dennis tackles the topic from a somewhat different viewpoint, so here's my take on the it.

I was most seriously involved in usenet between about 1983 and 1986, when I had free-and-easy access courtesy of Warwick University. It doesn't appear that much of usenet back then was archived, but you may be able to find a few of my posts lurking somewhere. I have dipped in and out a few times since, but for me that was the golden age of usenet, long before the "Eternal September".

To understand the real significance of usenet during this period and earlier, you need to come to terms with one overwhelmingly important factor. We had email, sure, but to send a message to a user of another machine, you needed to list, by name, every machine that the message would need to pass through to reach the destination. Take a few moments to think about this, and how different it is from today's world of "bill@microsoft.com" and "president@whitehouse.gov". There was no central naming service - all we could do to shorten things a little was to give directions from a handful of well-known machines. I recall giving my email address as something like ..hpvax!root44!warwick!snow!fkc. With any luck, a potential correspondent would know how to get to hpvax from their machine, and could follow my instructions from there.

Without a naming service there could be no URLs and hyper-links, and thus no web or most of the other services we use so commonly today. In this context, usenet, for all its clumsiness and rigid hierarchical structure seemed a breath of fresh air. Unlike all the other network communication systems we had available, usenet was a community. Once your machine became a usenet node you could simply and easily post a message which would (over the next few days) be seen by hundreds (or even thousands) of interested readers all around the world. And those with something to say in return could add their thoughts to the collection.

When I first encountered usenet I was so intoxicated that I would spend hours and hours every day reading all of it, Yes, I read every usenet post that made it to our machine, from sci-fi to US politics, from music to philosophy. These days, of course, reading all of even one major newsgroup is an impossible task. Inevitably the purely sequential reader programs ("press SPACE for the next post ...") that I cut my teeth on have given way to ones designed to categorise, filter, skip and "killfile" more posts than you ever actually read.

The community formed from the broad reading and (generally) thoughtful writing of a mutually comprehensible group of usenet users bears striking similarities to the early days of weblogs. My early fascination with usenet is echoed in the time I currently waste spend researching on weblogs. I still find it worthwhile to read some heartfelt posts on topics completely unconnected with my own work, although mostlty I start the day with a more focussed aggregator such as JavaBlogs.

I'm sure weblogging and the habits of weblog readers and writers have a lot more developing to do yet, though. After all, depsite the best efforts of educational blogging evangelists, we can still tell when it's September ...