Big Bill is watching your posts
Published: 19 Aug 2003 15:25 BST
What's wrong with "community"? The word seems to come up all the time when we talk about the Internet.
When we say "community," perhaps what we really are looking at is a special case of a broader phenomenon that sociologists call collective action, when a group of people do something together. And this turns out to be the No. 1 thing people do with their computers: it's to send each other email. The No. 2 thing is to send groups of people email -- to join the list of people who like to knit, or who like Microsoft products.
So why exactly does Microsoft need a resident sociologist?
Microsoft has a big investment in online communities, and has not had until recently many tools to enhance that investment. What Microsoft wants around communities is what every enterprise does, which is a peer-support, knowledge-management application. And that means that if you go into Usenet, you'll find 3,000 Microsoft public newsgroups, with 1.5 million people posting 10 million messages. And that's 2002 -- and it's going to more than double this year, because it more than doubled in '01. We don't see traffic flagging at all.
My impression was that the use of email lists was on the decline.
To the contrary! It's on the rise. Usenet alone -- which is a backwater in that most people don't know where it is and how to find it -- on Usenet alone there were 13.1 million unique identities who used Usenet in 2002, and by that we mean that they were a contributor and wrote at least one message. How many people read the message? We have no idea. That number is invisible and is fragmented over a half-million servers that are not sharing their data. But conservatively you could estimate that there are 10 readers for every writer, so that makes it 130 million Usenet users per year. And that's a small number compared to majordomo lists, or things like Yahoo Groups, and the number of people who have a bulletin board on things like UltimateBBS.
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