************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 2000 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** Tap into the geek gestalt The Internet's Usenet net.news system used to be a great place to go for advice and information with the personal touch. If you wanted to find out how to work around a Windows bug, how to make a great cup of coffee, where to stay in Seoul on the cheap, or get an opinion or two on who is piloting those black helicopters following you, someone on Usenet would know. Certainly there were flame wars and off topic rants. In some ways that added to the fun. But then spammers moved in. Not only did hundreds of spammers fill every news group with massive amounts of off-topic advertising, making searching for relevant postings painfully difficult, but spammers began stripping email addresses out of posts and firing off hundreds of thousands of thoroughly disgusting emails about porn sites promising they were hosted on servers in countries where attitudes and laws towards the degradation of women were simply different. Since 1995 die hard Usenet users have relied on Dejanews (www.dejanews.com) to keep up with news they might have missed. For the last five years, Dejanews has faithfully archived every message posted to Usenet. A search engine lets you find postings on any topic or by anyone. About a year ago, Dejanews changed its focus from being simply a news archive to an online version of Consumer Reports. Users could rate and comment on products and services ranging from airlines to web cameras. I suppose a lot of users were using dejanews for getting opinions on things like a good pair of headphones. The change in focus was logical and the potential for making bucks from ecommerce was grand. Dejanews seems to have buried the Usenet portion under their consumer rating service. Even the URL www.dejanews.com now resolves to "newsless" www.deja.com URL. These consumer reports are not bad. But in all things, volume helps give a clearer picture. For example, in a rating of airlines, Air Canada ranks 54 out of 90 airlines. Two hundred users ranked Air Canada well below several discount airlines with reputations for being little more than cattle trucks with wings. However, these higher placed discount airlines were rated by less than 20 people. Those seeking Usenet's interactive advice without all the spam might find askme.com a useful service. Self-professed experts on various topics answer questions on fashion, travel, car repairs ... you name it. Experts provide brief biographical data. Users rate the quality and accuracy of their answers. Over time, it becomes apparent if an expert truly has some skilled knowledge. In the screenwriting section, the top rated expert claims to be a working Hollywood screenwriter, having written for Disney, TriStar, Miramax, and more. He offers some pretty good advice but a search of the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) lists no writing credits for his given name. Both Yahoo and Microsoft have built on Usenet's message board concept. They have added advanced features like live chat, memberships in moderated message boards, and photo albums so you can see the people you're debating with. Microsoft calls them communities (communities.msn.com). Yahoo calls them clubs (clubs.yahoo.com). All your favorite Usenet topics are up for mind-numbing debate like UFOs, evolution versus creationism, and abortion. If you can't find an MSN or Yahoo community to match your interest, it's reasonably easy to start your own with these services. Usenet's system for creating a new newsgroup was not only obscure but once you found out how to propose a new group, the process was very rigid, featured a lot of cranky debate, and required a vote. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing. One of the problems with Usenet group creation was everyone wanted to create their own vanity group like soc.find.karl.mamer.a.girlfriend. Ha ha. Finding legitimate groups among thousands of one-joke group names is problematic. The oddest message board community to emerge from the great flight from Usenet is Everything2 (www.everything2.com). When Cyberspace last looked in on Everything (see my Sept 1999 column about Everything 1.0), it was part of the geek community's main news and message service called Slashdot.org. It got spun off into to its own domain. Its original intent is still in place. Everything2's users seek to create a dictionary that defines everything (hence the name). The 2.0 version has added things like a chat system to generate more interaction between the definition authors, a voting system so you can rate the quality of definitions, and an experience point system. More definitions you write, higher up you advance in level. You receive new "powers" at high levels. Everything2 is not for everyone. Much of its information is either wrong, open to debate/interpretation/flames, or apocryphal. Oddly enough, I find myself using Everything2 as a primary resource when writing this column. I certainly don't use it for hard facts. But since most of the definition authors are hardcore computer geeks, it's a marvelous way to tap into the geek gestalt. You know?