Written By: Patrick Grote
Date: February 8,. 2003 (Previously published)
Section: Viewpoints

I love the Internet. I love being connected to the Internet. I am an Internet Freak. There. I admit it. Yes, I am an Internet Freak!

Part of being an Internet freak is using the Internet in ways other people use conventional items. Take newspapers. Never read them. I get all my news on-line, including local news. Take communicating with friends and family. Some pick up the phone and call, while I e-mail. Take the radio. The radio? Yes, the radio!

Two years ago a small company called Real Networks came to life with a program called Real Player. Pretty soon a site called AudioNet started listing live events from around the world available using your Real Player. Pretty soon radios were simulcasting on the internet and that spelled doom for my radio.

I found it was easier to find *something* to listen to on the Internet when I was up late and working on things. I bounced from place to place until I found something that was perfect. Not only did it have a lively topic, but it ran from 12:00AM to 5:00AM each and every late night. Not only that, but if I missed a night, broadcast.com was cool enough to have the previous broadcasts on-line. This meant at anytime anywhere I could listen to this very intriguing and entertaining program. That program was the Art Bell show.

If you have never heard the Art Bell show, you don't know what you are missing. Art uses no producers, no call screeners and delves into topics as diverse as Ancient Archaeology to Yetis. Sprinkle in calls to his Time Traveler and Werewolf/Vampire lines and you have a very lively show! I can;t ever recall finding a boring topic on the Art Bell shows. My favorites were the psychics who come on and predict things like earthquakes, the stock market, Amelia Earhart's whereabouts and the end of the world. Yes, Art talks about UFOs, too, but it's not the only thing he handles. Even his commercials for things like night vision goggles, Snappy and a natural Viagra substitute were cool.

The Art Bell program became my constant companion whenever I was working on the computer. I was bummed out when he went out of town and played a repeat show. I was happy when he returned and started out fresh.

This was the case on 10/12/98. Art and his wife had just returned from a trip to South Africa. Art featured open lines for the entire program and the topics ranged wildly. Unfortunately I had to hit the sack, so I went to bed about half way through. What a mistake that was. The next morning when I went to his site to read the summary of the previous night's broadcast I was aghast to read that Art Bell had announced he was quitting his show.

The news took me almost like a friend dying. I listened to the clip of his sign off which detailed the shocking announcement. Yep, it was Art Bell saying he was quitting.

I started my desperate search for information at the local haunts. CNN and ABCNews. Zippo. Nada. Nothing. I went to AP and searched the wire and found a story. No more info. Bummer. I then made a very bad mistake ... I turned to Usenet.

Usenet is a message based system where users leave messages in groups catering to subjects they enjoy. Luckily there was an Art Bell Group (alt.fan.artbell). I started reading the messages and it was amazing. There was everyone and their mother with their ideas on what happened to Art Bell. Someone had him as an alien. Others had him as a clone. One even suggested our government took him out. Gee, this was helpful.

Where was the information? How could I verify what is being said? Even the usernames of the message authors were not real!

After reading the over 600 messages I was amazed by three things:

1) There was very no spam (of course, I was reading the messages through DejaNews, which does a great job of filtering spam

2) There was very little information to be had. Mostly wacky rumors feeding on other wacky rumors.

3) I miss the old BBS networks!

If you think you are a veteran of the on-line world because you used a SLIP connection you have so much to learn about the on-line world. Before there was the commercialization of the Internet there were Bulletin Board Systems. BBSes. Affiliation of BBSes running the same message transfer software banded together to create message networks. The names were as varied as their methodologies: FidoNet, Intelec, Ilink and RIME to name a few. The idea was simple in its concept. I post a message on my BBS. Several times a day my BBS calls another BBS and passes my new messages along. Within anywhere from 2-24 hours my new message was all around the world on BBSes.

Each of these message networks had multiple message conferences catering to everything from Hardware Support to Alien Theories. They key wasn't how the messages were distributed, though. The key was that the message networks and their areas were moderated. EGADS! There is that word all Internet people hate! Yes, folks, there were people who were Conference Hosts. Their job was to seed the conference with messages to get it growing and then maintain it by ensuring people posted messages on-topic. This included banning people who participated in open flame wars or posted information that wasn't relevant to a conference. It worked and it worked well.

Why did it work well? First, you could tell who authored each and every message. You could also ensure it came from a valid BBS in the network. Usenet allows anyone from anywhere to post to the system. Second, people respected the rules and those people who were there to enforce it. On the Internet, specifically Usenet, you only censored or banned if you happen to carpet bomb Usenet with spam. At that point it isn't even you that gets banned it is your ISP.

There aren't many alternatives at this point. The old BBS networks exist in some shape and form, but they aren't the same. Very few people use BBSes, yet alone message systems.

There is one alternative, a new program called Usenet2 Usenet2 basically takes the tried and true method of moderated conferences as brings them to the net. It isn't a very popular approach to messaging on the frontier of the Internet, but hopefully it can bring some order out of the chaos and make Usenet useful for more than technical support and pornography.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
delicious | digg | reddit | furl | technorati | icerocket