The Lair

There was a time when I was addicted to Usenet. Armed with nothing more than my trusty newsreader, I’d be subscribed to dozens of newsgroups on almost every conceivable topic. The first batch of news wouldn’t be read before I got a fresh set of posts, literally. Along with that other staple of geek interaction in the early days, IRC, I’d essentially have both clients running my entire work day. And yes, the obvious question answered: a good bit of work got done too.

That was the early days though, and now it seems like those communication mediums have been supplanted by other, possibly more user friendly applications. Everyone uses their IM client, some (like yours truly) are on multiple networks at the same time. Usenet has undergone a drastic change; with it’s signal to noise ratio, never very high to begin with, now reaching epic lows. In fact, some of my favourite newsgroups see more spam than real people commenting. Sad, really. Of course, a web based Usenet interface has pushed up numbers slightly, but it’s not the same.

There is something fundamentally different between the protocols and communication mediums of old as compared to today. It is all about control and with the newer forms of communication, I feel there is a lot less power conferred on the individual user. Take one example, Usenet vs the now ubiquitious web based bulletin board. Or IM vs IRC. Or for a slightly far out example, web based email clients vs a full featured client which runs on one’s own machine. In each of these cases, the newer interface is slightly less flexible, slightly less malleable to user whims and choices than it’s predecessor. Do web based bulletin boards have kill files ? Watch lists ? Threading, filtering ? Some of them do, certainly. But the choice to watch threads, filter topics of interest for flagging, ignore obnoxious users and thread replies in a manner which makes sense to the reader is left upto the implementor of the bulletin board. Not everyone uses those features, so catering to the common denominator means that the power users (and I freely call myself a Usenet power user) are left out in the cold. How much personalized spam detection does a web based mail client perform ? How much choice does a user of a IM network have if their closest connecting server goes down ?

So, what’s a guy to do ? O tempora, O mores etc. The new Usenet for me is my RSS reader. As with most of my other software, I spend a near obsessive amount of time choosing, then discarding my choices and then reevaluating what I want from a RSS reader. Because I’m anally retentive like that. But has RSS really conferred a degree of control over what is presented ? Possibly. I’m really not clear about where RSS sits in the content provider’s armoury, to be honest. On one hand, it offers a low bandwidth, easily parseable version of what goes on in the main site. Granted. Through the capability of individual RSS readers, it provides the capability for automatic updates, in much the same way as an email client might check a POP3 account. But what benefit does it really offer the person providing the content ? The answer, till recently, was not much. RSS feed statistics, unlike conventional hit counting and page statistics, were flying under the radar for a fair amount of time. Feedburner changed all this, of course. Now, people who care can actually monitor the subscriptions on their RSS feeds. But that still doesn’t provide a revenue stream, does it ? So, the next logical step, advertising in RSS. Kottke talks about the options available for blocking advertising in RSS feeds.

And this is sort of my point. The nice thing about the protocols of yore that I moaned over is it’s capability to be parsed by many clients. Usenet runs on the very nice NNTP protocol. Number of clients ? In the dozens, if not hundreds. IRC ? Same (except that IRC is also the name of the protocol). Number of clients ? Hundreds. We haven’t seen the same degree of flexibility or the third party clients for IM networks just yet. And how could we ? At the end of the day, unlike IRC, the IM networks are controlled (excluding Jabber, of course) by commercial entities. Do they want people to run third party clients ? I doubt it. With RSS, there emerged the frightening possibility that content would once again be capable of being selected and manipulated by clients. And that’s why people are rushing to monetize their syndicated feeds.

And then, someone made Greasemonkey.