Newsgroups
Mary Anne mentioned newsgroups in a journal entry this morning. Wanted to point people (especially OS X users) to three resources:
- Google groups is a reasonably nice Web-based interface to the newsgroups. You can navigate the group hierarchies, find the group you're looking for (such as rec.arts.sf.written), and click a link to a particular thread, which gives you a reasonably nice hierachical interface to viewing the messages in the thread.
- Simon Fraser (you've met him, Mary Anne; in fact, you even have pictures of him in your journal) is the author of a Mac application called MT-NewsWatcher. It's derived from an older application called NewsWatcher, but the latest OS X versions of MT-NewsWatcher are much better than the original app. (The original NewsWatcher has evolved into a payware app called Thoth, which isn't bad, but I like MT-NewsWatcher better, and MT-NewsWatcher is free.) The interface for getting set up doesn't quite fit my expected mental model, so I find it a little tricky, but once you're set up, it's pretty easy to use. It doesn't quite have the same kind of hierarchy-view that trn (which really fit my head) had, but it does provide a collapsible hierarchical view of the threads. One advantage over Google groups: you can point MT-NewsWatcher to any news server, so you can (for example) read the sff.net newsgroups using it, which is a much nicer way to do that than their (admittedly quite usable) Web interface.
- Of course, another option for OS X users is to install trn locally. (Yay, desktop UNIX!) I haven't done this, but it should be possible. But I'm not sure whether you can point trn to a non-local news server; you might have to get a news feed on your OS X box to be able to view news there.
As for alt.callahans, the first two Tall Tales I posted there ("Horses Sweeter Than Wine" and "Power Corrupts") are dated April and May 1990, which must've been during the second period when I was briefly a regular there. (I had hung out there for a while back at the very beginning; I don't even remember when that was.) I never posted very much, but read it avidly. Apparently I came back five years later (during a brief return to newsreading while I was at SGI) to post another Tall Tale ("Night of the Dentist"), and stuck around for a couple days but not for long. Reading all the newsgroups I'm interested in would be more than a 24-hour-a-day job. (There was even a time when I was only reading a couple of newsgroups that were in my second tier of interestingness, because I knew the first-tier ones would be an infinite time-sink.) So mostly I just stay away.
(So perhaps I'm not doing anyone a service by pointing to ways to read news. . . .)
I do sometimes think it'd be nice for SH to have more of a presence on the newsgroups, but I don't think that strongly enough to go become that presence.
Addendum re those Tall Tales: I think they were among the first things I posted to my Web site (in late '95), which at the time consisted of a few pages hosted on a server that SGI provided for employees to create personal sites. . . . Well, okay, I'm not actually sure when I started the site; it looks like Cosmo Create, the SGI Web-authoring tool, first came out in '93 or so, and I was involved in documenting that (I believe the slogan was "Author and Serve," since the authoring tool was mostly there to sell the Web server), and I think I started creating my own pages right around then. Further research is indicated.