Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:33:26 -0500
From: Eva Whitley <eva.whitley at gmail.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Not quite the death of Usenet, but still ...
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> "Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Hardly any mention in Usenet of Denvention, but a fair piece of
>> discussion on various blogs, according to Google's blog search.
>>
>
> How do you figure that?  A Google Groups search of all mentions
> of Denvention in Usenet gets 298 hits.  A Google Blogs search of
> all mentions of Denvention on blogs gets 333 hits.  More, but
> not enormously more.  There are also 571 hits on Usenet messages
> containing both "Denver" and "Worldcon" but not "Denvention."
>
> Of course Usenet is old enough that it was around during the
> *previous* Denvention.  If I only look at posts made in this century,
> I get 161.  Still a fair number, especially considering the con hasn't
> happened yet.
>
> Usenet is far from dead.  So far this month, rec.arts.sf.fandom has
> gotten 839 posts, and rec.arts.sf.written has gotten an astonishing
> 11,951, nearly as many as this list has gotten in the nearly six years
> it has existed.  And there are tens of thousands of other Usenet
> newsgroups.
>
> "Denvention" (or "Denver Worldcon") has been recently mentioned
> in alt.callahans, alt.fan.heinlein, alt.sex.stories.d,
> alt.support.dissociation, comp.lang.cobol, mn.sf, rec.arts.mystery,
> rec.arts.sf.announce, rec.arts.sf.composition, rec.arts.sf.fandom,
> rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, rec.music.filk, and
> soc.sexuality.spanking.
>
May not be a fair comparison. I don't know about the other social
networking sites but on LJ one can set  blog posts to be seen by a
screened group (friends list) and that would lock out Google, no? I wish
there had been similar options on Usenet--I got so tired of being
stalked by cretins who didn't like what I had to say and rather than
debate the issue, decided to engage in RL harassment.

Those hits for Denvention--I wonder if they actually discussed
Denvention or whether they were embedded in spam gibberish.  So much of
Usenet seems to be spam these days. --Eva Whitley.