small software project III

[nibot]

I think it's a shame that usenet is so little known these days... a point illustrated by posts on the UC Berkeley livejournal community to trade textbooks, something that could and, in my opinion, should, be done on the campus newsgroup ucb.market.books. I blame this entirely on the 'unfriendly' interface to usenet, as opposed to specialized sites like LiveJournal, and because it operates outside of the interweb, that segment of the internet subject to so much tunnel-vision. Anyway, small idea: make a NNTP-to-RSS feed, so that usenet articles from a given newsgroup can occur in LJ users' friends lists! Somehow they could be linked to the actual articles (maybe via Google Groups) for the posting of replies.

I think that the centralization of services such as LiveJournal is quite stupid in the long run, but, then again, I'm much too lazy to do anything about it. (-:

Comments

[dedoleo.livejournal.com]

I also feel that Usenet should be used more, though web message boards seem to be taking over. I dislike the no-branch method of most web boards where you have to read through everyone's post to figure out what's going on. Especially because the topic seems to change over a long course. I prefer how topics branch in Usenet so if I see a reply by someone I don't care to read, then I can just ignore every other reply made to that persons post by skipping over that branch.

What do you mean by the "centralization of services such as Livejournal"?

UCB eBay-ish

[ucbfumbler.livejournal.com]

I always thought that an eBay or book-trading service was necessary. It would cut out the middlemen and basically get everyone a better price on their books.