The line times, they are a-changing and changing and changing

[jducoeur]

Yow. Today's truly remarkable labor of love is XKCD's New Map of Online Communities -- drawn this time not in terms of number of users, but the much more interesting measure of number of social actions taken. Lots of heroic assumptions involved, but it's still a damned excellent overview of the subject.

But for a real sense of historical perspective, I invite my fellow long-time netizens to find Usenet on the map. It's there, but you'll have to click through to the large-size version and do some serious hunting. It makes for some hard introspection to realize that, when I started online, Usenet would probably have made up 2/3 of this map. (And the main map would have been such a small fraction of the "Spoken Language" inset as to be invisible.) Of course, in those days I could actually follow all the messages in every newsgroup that I actually gave a damn about -- I was probably *reading* a non-trivial fraction of the map. So the real change is that the map is now -- well, I don't really want to think about how many orders of magnitude -- bigger than it was then...

Comments

[mermaidlady]

It pleases me that Usenet is still out there.

I've never heard of a large percentage of the "territories" on the map.

[cellio]

This morning as I was perusing that I casually wondered how much productivity was lost to it among my fellow geeks. (I'd never heard of several of the areas but resisted the temptation to go find out. :-) )

[fosveny.livejournal.com]

There was a week in 1990 when I subscribed to every single Usenet group then in existence.

...I was in college, I was sick as a dog, I was fluff-headed enough to be unable to do anything but read, and I left my room once a day to shower and eat. Took about 12-14 hours a day, but I had absolutely nothing else to do.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, Usenet came up on one of my former company/former employees mailing lists. Someone posted something on the order "Ah yes. Back in 1984, I spent a half hour or so a day reading all of Usenet".