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This page was initially drafted on 31 July 1998 as a selection of the best links from the Robot Wisdom Weblog archives. A few layers of refinement have been added since then, with the aim of gradually constructing a concise introduction to net.literacy on each of these topics. So stay tuned!
email eudora
mail lists
netnews
What the media hasn't figured out yet is that netnews is the
net's real cultural battlefield, and all cultural innovations have to pass netnews scrutiny... which is the most intense and unforgiving in human history.
the culture
dejanews
trolls, xposting, news.test
web
web design
webcams
icq
Once you've got email, there's no turning back. [Oops. Here's a computer wizard who did.]
The barriers to communication with anyone else on the Net are reduced to just-above-zero. In a matter of hours, you can re-establish contact with people who've been entirely out of your life for many decades. (You discover that even when it's zero-effort, you really don't have that much to say to most of them.) Popular people-search sites:
In three years there should be cheap phones that offer email to the unwired, with text-only web-browsing also supported. (The keyboards for these may be detachable and battery-operated, with tiny screens of their own, so you can compose messages on the road.)
Your email address will quickly become a commodity sold far and wide, resulting in tons of unsolicited ads, called "spam" after Monty Python's "Bloody Vikings!" sketch. How to reduce spam:
Beware of chain letters, which have been around forever and are extremely unwelcome, usually illegal.
You can subscribe to mailing lists on any topic. Some are great, some are quiet, some will flood your mailbox with useless bickering. Searching DejaNews is one strategy for finding mentions of good mailing lists. Before you subscribe, you should set up a filter in your email program to put all the list's messages in a separate mailbox. (Also: unsubscribing from email requires the exact From-address you subscribed with, so always CC yourself when sending a subscribe message, and save it.)
If you speak up, you'll eventually get flamed.
Free service for time-delayed email messages: http://www.mailtothefuture.com/
If you don't mind having ads added to every message, you can start a free mailing list
"Free" mailing-list services compared (Salon-2pg)
Salon has two excellent pieces on email romance and a book-excerpt
An interminable Wired article about mailing-lists includes many useful statistics about how they make money
An author who's glad he published his email address on his novel
A detailed look at the Echelon system for mass-monitoring email and faxes
Getting a personal email address
For many years before the arrival of the Web, a highly evolved Internet culture existed on the Usenet newsgroups, aka netnews. Many other interactive forums exist on the Net, but netnews is the one that's truly universal and anarchic, and it's vastly more efficient than web-based chat boards.
The success of the Web has had little effect on netnews culture, where traditions had been formalised by bloody, ongoing single combat over the preceding decade. All the West Coast 'digerati' hide out in moderated forums like the Well, so they're viewed by netnews culture as pretentious wusses.
Your post to netnews will be copied within hours to millions and millions of hard drives worldwide. Because these copies are local, when you read a newsgroup, you get very fast access to all the new postings in just those topic areas you've subscribed to. This makes the newsgroup an unparalleled worldwide filtering system for new developments in that topic area.
Three problems keep this system from working optimally:
Some centers of netnews culture: alt.religion.kibology, alt.folklore.urban, alt.fan.warlord, talk.bizarre
Relativity:
Many familiar conventions of conversation are violated by technological necessity:
And a good brief technical history of netnews
On net.subculture.usenet, Simon Gray suggests:
i've found it quite cathartic to email a friend with the viciously insulting post following up some idiot that I might otherwise have posted to the group - thus getting the annoyance out of my system without drastically increasing the public nastiness.
DejaNews is starting to archive mailing lists, probably responding to competition from Reference.Com which offers thousands of searchable mailing list archives along with the usual searchable newsgroup archives.
An exemplary archive for talk.origins: http://www.talkorigins.org/
At least someone is trying to keep an eye on netnews society. An academic approach.
A new netnews 'agent' called NewsMonger (Win95)
Intro to hi-speed connection options
Dvorak praises ADSL: http://boardwatch.internet.com/mag/99/jan/bwm33.html
Inside look at nerve center: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/center1/net112998.htm
Boardwatch traces the evolution of net backbones, identifies the worst bottleneck, and proposes leveraging new guidelines via the WorldCom-MCI merger
Blizzard Software spied on its users' hard drives to detect piracy
Jakob Nielsen names a law after himself
Looking even further ahead, Nielsen's Law does predict that the Web will be 57 times faster in ten years.
Since 1956, the NSA has had a secret deal with the Swiss company that supplies the world with crypto
New Boardwatch features a technical look at the 56k modem mess
A new approach to crypto
Internet Weather Report neatly monitors packet-loss at various points
Authoritative teen-DoD-hacker site, with fascinating IRC interviews
How the NY Times site was hacked
alt.fan.cult-dead-cow, alt.fan.kevin-mitnick
The new month brings a new Boardwatch, with this exciting, knowing, technical look at backbones, caching, and a new satellite proposal called SkyCache
A piece on IP telephony
MicroTimes surveys Internet telephony
An intro to Gates's Internet-in-the-Sky, Teledesic
Amsterdam's cheap Internet pay-phones
And a somewhat hairy technical explanation of Web-caching
The French Internet is different:
http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/features/98_stories/stories_france.htm
Savvy move: an official MUD for Xena
More insightful hacker sociology/ anthropology/ history from Eric Raymond
Fortune has a long look at AOL. This page has the most interesting financial details
Some harmless lunacy: Toronto's Serial Diners
Forbes disses the Motley Fool
An old, pretentious inquiry into the philosophical origins of Wired
How small ISPs can compete by adding value
Internet privacy, with lots of lively links
If you're on a Mac or Win95/NT, there's an under-one-meg standalone chat server called AtChat whose special selling point is the chatbot it works with-- their online demo is an impersonation of Mac columnist Don Crabb, which can answer simple questions about the Mac
Why are so many conservatives good prose stylists? George Gilder's online book Telecosm is a readable and wide-ranging exploration of the internet age (only slightly outdated for being three years old). It also has the unique advantage of chapter-by-chapter responses from the biggest names in the business
And Bill Frezza argues that the biggest cultural impact of the Net will be via invisible commerce
And a witty piece by Joe Queenan about the inhibiting effect of instantaneous feedback on the Net
Salon's funny and righteous guide to getting your parents online
The Village Voice also has a look at Echo
And the founder of Echo, on ISPs as communities
In 1985, Jerry Pournelle (the Byte columnist) was kicked off the Arpanet
This multi-part series on hackers looks excellent
IRC sad sack (Barry) comes on to bot (Julia)
A slightly more detailed piece on cyberwar
Classic Julian Dibbell essay on MUDs, A Rape in Cyberspace
A detailed look at web ad revenues
Another: http://www.adresource.com/html/web_advertising.html
Web porn as a cottage industry
...as a serious business.
And explains what merchants can do with cookies
A skeptical look at web-profiling
126 ways to make money off your website, via referrals
How webzines pay the bills (includes a juicy tabulation)
And a superb long piece on Yoyodyne's very sensible permission model for advertising
Salon looks at the underground economy of password-theft
Three generations of online game-promotions, briefly compared
Two of the most readable computer journalists-- John Dvorak and Jerry Pournelle-- are about to launch a Siskel/Ebert-style weekly debate site, using 'wallet' technology to charge a dime a week. You'll be able to buy small amounts of 'scrip' via a 900 number, which sounds smooth enough that I'll probably give it a try. (Dvorak I usually agree with, while Pournelle is a sort of morbidly fascinating Martha-Stewart extreme-hardware spectator-spectacle.) See the announcement in Pournelle's latest Byte column
The web-merchandising model: Jane Siberry auctions off stuff
A nice business model, critiquing web design
Yahoo backgrounder
Weird-looking URLs: easy.to/remember and i.am/kinnison
Salon's overview of online journalling
Misguided corporate attempts at web community
An old Salon look at Web meta-sites (cf weblogs)
And a very fine appreciation of WebCams
Hooray for online universities
And a witty piece by Joe Queenan about the inhibiting effect of instantaneous feedback on the Net
Here's an exciting piece from August, about a neatly-designed, net-based product for cataloging your CD-collection
Hackers peek under the hoods of various net-nanny programs
Dvorak suggests some sneaky uses for unlinked URLs
Profile of an Internet detective
An archive of two dozen hacked websites
A nice look at the lo-tech browser, Opera
Review of free page-change services:
http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL1999/net3.html
Philip Greenspun offers several free services for making your website interactive: http://ArsDigita.com/services.html#free_services
A place that does the same for polls, with ads
Thunderstone will index your website for free: http://www.thunderstone.com/
Another free site-search service, SiteMiner http://www.siteminer.com/
My weblog is accessible via i.am/jorn. Here's background on this free forwarding service.
Free 50MB online storage (CMP)
Free website traffic analysis w/community: http://www.hitbox.com/
A glossary of html-log analysis jargon
Pascal's Header-Echo: Scary direct feedback about what others can see when you surf. How to hide
For downloading large files with the Mac, Anarchie Pro will let you interrupt and restart-- priceless (and free)!
Don't miss one of Jakob Nielsen's best columns ever, on playing to the Web's strengths
And a good piece on spying on your competitors via net search engines, etc
The Web Innovator Awards offer concise histories of RDF, NetObjects, Cold Fusion, the Link Exchange, etc
A clear basic intro to XML
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