wiredfool

Of course, Usenet is a solution to a different problem. Usenet is not syndication, and irc isn’t IM. They both have a different hierarchial relationship than their predecessors.

Usenet is a very peer to peer relationship between servers, but once you are within the realm of an ISP, it’s a centralized service. Usenet has an infrastructure and management cost that your ordinary aggregator simply doesn’t require and can’t provide. Aggregators have an ad-hoc nature that lower the barrier between connecting readers and writers. For the readers, type in a url and autodiscovery takes over. For the writers, just summarize, rerender, and point to it.

NNTP solves a different problem of injecting one message somewhere in the network and having it show up in every interested unread list. It’s essentially a perfect cache – one message tranmission from the source for all the readers. Aggregation does not require this level of caching.

Usenet also has the problem of trust. Its design encourages essentially untrusted clients to send a single message to a world wide audience – giving it the effect of a network of open relay mail servers. So usenet in its gigabyte per day full feed glory isn’t the answer.