Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.com From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Is USENET stagnating? Message-ID: <1519@intercon.com> Date: 29 Oct 89 13:26:26 GMT References: <40056@looking.on.ca> Sender: news@intercon.com Reply-To: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation Lines: 35 In article <40056@looking.on.ca>, brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: > Now the object of this article is not to have everybody list some minor > new thing that's happened to USENET. I want to find out why we aren't > watching *major* changes, and why we aren't watching a lot of them. > And what we can do about it. > > I do know one reason, and it comes from my own experience as (I think) one > of the few people to try to do completely new things in this network > environment. You get pointlessly flamed whenever you try to innovate. > > People have forgotten what USENET should be about. USENET is about > *doing* things in computer networking. Not thinking up arguments why > people shouldn't do them. I think that there are a couple of things which have happened to Usenet over the past few years. One is simply that it has gradually changed from being an experiment to being an institution. You can get away with stuff on a testbed that you can't get away with on a production system, and Usenet is at this point more similar in many ways to a production evironment than an experimental one. This instills some inertia right there. Another thing, which I do think is revolutionary, is that the edges are blurring rather quickly these days. From the newsgroups & occasional gatewayed mailing list, we now have AP & UPI feeds, Fidonet conferences, gateways (at least experimental ones) to commercial services like CompuServe, Genie, AppleLink, and so on. Usenet is quickly become the place for "one stop shoppping" when it comes to computer-based telecommunication. This would have been science fiction a mere decade ago... -- Amanda Walker -- "If your application does not run correctly, do not blame the operating system." -- Geoffrey James, _The_Zen_of_Programming