Combining blogging and usenet

More thinking going on about blogging, and how it relates to this whole new world that’s supposed to be out there. A post which is most definately “quick and dirty”, so expect this to get refined or revoked as time goes on…

My problem is this - there’s at least a million blogs out there that I could be reading, and some have content that I’m a) interested in; b) could find useful either now or in the future. But at the moment I’m restricted to accessing them either by serendipity of links from somewhere else; by explicit action on my part such as subscribing to an RSS feed; or by stumbling across them as the result of a search.

The beauty of weblogs is the sheer volume and variety of content - but that’s the achilles heel for me as well. The content is much less structured, and lends itself much more towards one-to-many outbound communication - I can tell the world about what I’m doing, but facilities such as trackback and comments apart, it’s not particularly easy for the world to ask me about what I’m up to.

Contrast that with Usenet. It’s the other way around here - I can ask the world, and the world can reply to me. Never mind that the signal to noise ratio is pretty ropey, and the threaded nature of the postings never really made it particularly easy to follow (are threads something that would be designed if we hadn’t got them already?) Where newsgoups do win out is when you combine a) the ease of posting and response on a one to many basis; b) the sheer volume of past content and c) the fact that you can search them pretty much at will from the Google Groups tab. But the killer fact about usenet is the inherent categorisation involved - if I want to discuss Barney The Purple Dinosaur I can read and post to alt.barny.die.die.die - it’s a self-selected walled garden of Barney-related content, which makes for inherent navigation to the right forum in a virtually hassle-free way.

So how do you combine the best of both worlds? How do you keep the richness and variety of the blogging world, and combine it with the categorisation and threading that is an inherent characteristic of Usenet?

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