Web 2.0, Meet Usenet 1.0
The” new” Web is all shiny and collaborative, but” old school” Usenet is still chugging along. Here, Randal Schwartz connects some of the new with some of the old, scraping CPAN for news of novel Perl modules.
Thursday, June 15th, 2006
The “new” Web is all shiny, with user-collaborative reviews and comments, AJAX interactions, and RSS feeds to track all those blogs and podcasts But before of all that nice IP traffic, we communicated “over the net” via email, mailing lists, and Usenet. Yes, Usenet, the original “distributed bulletin board” system, gave “netizens” soapboxes to scream and rant, ask and answer, and distribute messages to “thousands of machines around the net,” as Larry Wall’s rn program used to warn prior to every request to post.
Although the new generation of “net” users focuses on direct-IP communication (through the Web, in blogs, and with instant messaging and IRC), Usenet is still chugging along behind the scenes, being operated more or less as it has been since its inception in 1979.
For example, a portion of the Usenet newsgroups are moderated, meaning that articles posted to those groups aren’t immediately distributed to the world, but instead are mailed to a moderator for approval. comp.lang.perl.moderated operates in this fashion (as its name implies), which theoretically means the group has more light (of knowledge) and less heat (from flames). A dedicated group of moderators manages the group, including Stonehenge trainer Tad McClellan.
