google has made a few updates to its interface to the usenet archive that made my life a little easier today. they seem to be moving along despite the naysayers. the ‘relevant groups’ recommendation was giving me some odd offerings today though.
speaking of the usenet archives, i was browsing mappa mundi and ran across a recent article on the netscan project [which unfortunately seems to be down for the next few days]:
“Netscan provides a growing range of tools and visual interfaces to explore Usenet. Smith aims to provide interactive maps of Usenet to reveal just how successfully these [news]groups really are, to see a kind of satellite photo of a large swath of a social cyberspace.”
“The Netscan project is ongoing, but some of its key findings thus far are that Usenet “…continues to grow rapidly, that it is a remarkably international system, that it is not all pornography” says Smith. Netscan clearly shows Usenet also hosts a diverse range of different communities with distinctive styles of social interaction from long running discussions to heated political arguments, to simple job listings, file sharing, and Q&A technical support groups.”