Russ Allbery's Tribute to Usenet

[firecat]

via beaq and papersky and others

My experience isn't entirely the same (I still hang out on a bit of Usenet that has some of the feel of the old days, and to me strangers posting to my journal are more important than random e-mail replies to a web page), but it resonates strongly.

Despite having been on LJ for years and finding a lot of people on LJ who are interesting (and enjoying finding out more via LJ about people I knew less well via Usenet), I've converted a lot more of my Usenet friends into in-person friends than I have my LJ friends. Usenet newsgroups I've hung out on frequently organized get-togethers...the same sort of thing doesn't happen via LJ as far as I've discovered.

http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/community.html

Comments

[eagle]

I never know quite what to do with comments on writing like that, but I did post a pointer to it in my own journal, which does accept comments. Unfortunately, while LJ is already not particularly great at sparking long discussions, Movable Type is even worse. (I have a thing about keeping all of my content on systems I control because I'm paranoid about losing it, or I'd probably just use LJ for my own entries at this point.)

LJ seems to do the Usenet thing more by spreading the conversation through linked networks of posts, but as Brooks points out, it makes it quite hard to see the entire conversation. More discussion happens in people's own entries on the same topic than in the comment threads of most significant LJ entries I've read, I think in part because, due to something about the nature of the medium, LJ gets far fewer replies longer than the original post than Usenet does.

[elainegrey.livejournal.com]

Just a side note: LJ allows one to export entries month by month. I'm comfortable using LJ because i know i can export my entries and grep through them. Someday, i'll make a spotlight mapping for the XML export. (You can export csv as well.)

[eagle]

Huh, thanks, that's good to know. I suppose if I'd thought for a moment I would have figured they'd have something like that and would have looked for it, but I just assumed. That does make just using LJ more attractive. (Managing comments is far and away the most annoying part of running one's own journal software.)

[firecat]

Thanks, I commented over at your journal.

Besides the month-by-month download capability, there is also http://www.ljbook.com/ which will download the whole thing.

The distributed nature of the discussion on LJ is good insofar as it gets more people thinking about the topic but bad insofar as there is no way to automatically consolidate all posts discussing the topic. Some people make an effort to link to a variety of the posts but an automated solution would be best.