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*                         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:                          * 
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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?

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