Jeff and Sabrina Nelson, founders of the popular vegetarian Web site VegSource, stared at their computer, transfixed and helpless. Page by page, directory by directory, their site was disappearing, dismantled by an unknown online enemy. And there was nothing they could do.
The trouble started on May 21, around 5:30 p.m., when Jeff Nelson lost his connection to the VegSource Web server. Perplexed, he called his technical administrator — who had just discovered to his own shock that he, too, could no longer control the machine. Next, the front page of the Web site disappeared. Then, with dismaying inexorability, the rest of the site’s content began to vanish. Finally, the guts of the server’s operating system imploded. To make matters worse, the Nelsons discovered that, for reasons beyond their control, their site hadn’t been properly backed up.
VegSource had been destroyed. But by whom?
The Nelsons don’t know exactly who assaulted their Web site, and despite the involvement of the FBI and the hard work of their tech admin and ISP, they may never know. But they have a pretty good idea: They believe the culprit is a gun advocate who disapproved of the Nelsons’ banning of gun discussions from the message boards at VegSource.
For the three weeks before the attack, the Nelsons and VegSource had fought a running online battle with a group of vociferous pro-gun ideologues intent on disrupting debate at VegSource and harassing the Nelsons. According to the Nelsons, not long after they started deleting what they considered inappropriate posts to their message boards, they began to receive obscene phone calls and threatening e-mail. They saw their own physical address and phone numbers posted to message boards at pro-gun sites, along with threats to send the Nelsons a destructive computer virus. At one site in particular, “Tom Bowers’ Politically Incorrect Machine Gun Pages,” aka “Subguns,” the message board participants reveled in whipping each other into a frenzy of anti-vegetarian and anti-VegSource fervor.
Submachine gun groupies on the warpath against animal-loving vegetarians? At first glance, it looks like just another wacky slice of Net life. And we haven’t even begun to discuss the role of talk show host Rosie O’Donnell in all of this. Or the pistol-packing vegans popping out of the Web woodwork. Or the attack on Subguns itself by demented white power racists hailing from a Web site devoted to Adolf Hitler.
But to the Nelsons, the loss of three years of work — three years of interactively created content generated by an entire community — isn’t in the least bit ludicrous. Instead, it’s a depressing indication of where the Web is headed, mid-1999.
As the Web matures, it reflects ever more closely the stresses and shocks that radiate through the offline world — and its edges seem to sharpen. The VegSource trauma, for example, was a direct outgrowth of the Littleton high school massacre. Increasingly, the Web is where people are turning to voice their outrage and act out their passions in the wake of galvanizing current events.
At the same time, the Web is accelerating the creation of ever more specialized “communities of interest” — gathering places for more or less like-minded people, united by their love for dairy-free diets or Thompson submachine guns. These communities are fast becoming online tribes. Which means that what happened to VegSource may represent something more than just run-of-the-mill social friction: It could be a sign of burgeoning online tribal warfare.
The two central players in the guns vs. veggies drama, Subguns and VegSource, could hardly seem more different. In one corner, we have a bunch of card-carrying NRA members who like to share pictures of themselves firing lethal weapons. In the other, we find a flood of Gaia-worshippers who flaunt photographs of pet kittens. At Subguns, the regulars ask each other arcane questions about legal restrictions on high-caliber ammunition; at VegSource, the search is on for the perfect recipe for vegan chocolate eclairs (no eggs, please!).
But there are similarities, too. It’s not just that passionate gun rights activists and animal-liberation freedom fighters can be capable of nearly identical forms of arrogant intolerance. Or that both Web sites employ the same freely available Web conferencing software on their message boards — a program that makes anonymous and forged postings fairly easy. Both sites feature numerous topic-oriented message boards where there is little tumult — but each has at least one board in which political discussion regularly leads to flame wars.
Most significantly, Subguns and VegSource are both excellent examples of one of the most salient recent developments in Web life: they’re topic-specific online communities that have settled next to quasi-commercial hubs. Subguns belongs to Tom Bowers, a federally licensed firearms dealer who sells rifle silencers and equipment for modifying semi-automatic weapons. VegSource is a non-profit organization, but it sells ads to support its operation and features numerous links to other commercial, vegetarian-oriented Web sites.
Both sites exploit the Web’s greatest strength, its nurturing embrace of niche communities. The Web makes it easy to create a home for any point of view, any particular predilection or prejudice. But the fallout from such niche-ification doesn’t have to be friendly: It’s just as easy to brew hate as love. Jeff and Sabrina Nelson found that out the hard way in early May.
Last fall, says Jeff Nelson, he and his wife set up a forum in which VegSource regulars could discuss politics. The Clinton impeachment provided the inspiration, says Nelson, and at first the experiment seemed to work well.
“Regulars seemed to have fun sparring with each other over the dealings of Clinton, Starr, Tripp, Lewinsky and the rest of the gang,” says Nelson.
On this board, any topic was fair game — and on the Net, open debate almost inevitably leads to arguments over gun control. According to several regular posters to the VegSource message board, including at least two vegetarian gun-owners who also regularly frequented the Subguns site, the tenor of discussion, while spirited, generally remained within civilized bounds.
But then came the Littleton massacre. Suddenly, says Nelson, “some very disturbed-sounding people began showing up.”
Gun-rights enthusiasts are well-known for being vigorous online debaters. But to the Nelsons, it seemed that the newcomers had arrived solely to stir up trouble.
“Someone would ask a question about taking care of their cat,” says Sabrina Nelson, “and one of these guys would respond: ‘Why don’t you shoot your cat and eat it?’ That’s not the way we want people interacting at VegSource.”
“It was bizarre,” says Sabrina Nelson, “and totally out of the blue. All sorts of people showing up on the site as though they had been personally attacked by our site, and posting pictures of assault rifles, talking about masturbating, making jokes about killing their neighbor’s pets and murdering homosexuals.”
The boards at VegSource are moderated — “it’s a family site,” says Sabrina Nelson. So the Nelsons began deleting posts they considered particularly obscene or harassing. But as anyone who’s been involved in an online “gun thrash” knows, the one thing most likely to drive gun rights activists to a frenzy is limiting their freedom of speech.
Never mind that there is no such thing as a First Amendment right on a privately-owned Web site. The gun advocates responded to the deletion of their posts by posting in ever greater numbers. Soon the Nelsons discovered, from analysis of their site logs, that the invasion of VegSource was actually being coordinated and organized at other, gun-related Web sites — notably Subguns and another machine gun-friendly Web site, F.J. Vollmer & Company.
A typical message exhorting gun owners to cause trouble at VegSource read as follows: “FUN!! No shit! Go look. You can’t use profanity but you can say ugly stuff. FUCK ‘EM!!!!”
Finally, Jeff Nelson decided that enough was enough. In an announcement posted on the VegSource political board, he stated: “We’ve added a new guideline for removing posts and posters from this board. We’ve decided to ban people who are a-holes and who argue with us when we tell them to drop it. And for those who send us letters saying ‘You banned me! You don’t believe in freedom of speech!’ Well, that just proves that you don’t know how to behave yourself, so don’t expect any return letter.”
Nelson says that the mass deletions resulted in an intensified reaction, including a barrage of obscene phone calls and some physical threats in personal e-mail messages. But after he contacted the police, the Internet service providers of several of the most egregious posters and the owners of Subguns and F.J. Vollmer, the thrash eventually subsided.
If the ruckus had ended there, it might serve simply as a typical example of the kind of crank-infested hot air outbursts that afflict so much online discussion. But then came the direct attack on the Web server — strongly suggesting that the threats posted at the various pro-gun Web sites (and mostly removed since then) were far from empty.
VegSource is not the only nonprofit site hosted on the server that was assaulted, raising at least the possibility that it might not have been the target of the attack. But there’s no question that it was an attack: According to the server’s administrator, the assailant took advantage of a known bug in a popular mail-server program that, if carefully exploited, gives an outsider the chance to change the passwords controlling access to the machine — and then wreak whatever havoc they like.
Even if it wasn’t gun advocates who launched the server attack, the pro-gun partisans on the Subguns site certainly saw the “veggies” as their enemy.
What drove them to such rage?
It’s all Rosie O’Donnell’s fault, says Gary Zimmerman, a regular poster on the Subguns message boards.
On the day following the Littleton massacre, O’Donnell, a longtime proponent of gun control, directed some harsh words at gun owners during her broadcast, stating that only police should be allowed to have guns, and everyone else who owned a gun “should go to prison.”
Not long after that, says Zimmerman, gloating anti-gun posts that he says could be traced back to the VegSource message boards began to appear on the pro-gun sites. The gun owners, he says, naturally felt the need to strike back, both at O’Donnell and at VegSource.
Gun advocates are nothing if not insanely organized. In the case of O’Donnell, they targeted a free home page service offered by O’Donnell via her own Web site, a spinoff of Warner Brothers’ Acmecity complex. At last count, gun rights activists had created at least 100 “Rosie” pro-gun Web sites, boasting provocative titles such as “Rosie’s Second Amendment Right to Keep and Bear Arms Defense Center.”
It’s not hard to understand why the pro-gun activists mobilized so quickly. If you judge by the high-strung anxiety visible on the message boards, the nationwide tide of anti-gun sentiment set in motion by the Littleton massacre had them running scared. They were rightfully fearful that their gun-owning rights would soon be under sustained attack. So they lashed out — and Rosie O’Donnell aside, what better venue for antagonism could they find than a site like VegSource?
Sure, the politics of vegetarianism might appear to be light-years removed from the philosophy of gun ownership. But polar opposites attract, says Chris Reynolds, a self-styled vegetarian and supporter of “RKBA” — “the right to keep and bear arms.”
“I think the main reason that the topic was popular on the VegSource site,” says Reynolds, “is due to the political polarity of each group. Most pro-RKBA activists are conservative and hunters. Most vegetarian activists are liberal and anti-RKBA — partly due to an obvious connection with the hunting culture.”
Robert Johnson, another Subguns regular, says the uproar at VegSource began as a protest against what the gun owners saw as an unfair, cowardly censoring of unpopular pro-gun political views.
“I don’t remember what day I found the vegan site but it was the night before the banning and deleting started,” says Johnson. “I saw what I believed to be ignorant views about crime and the average gun owner, so I started two new posts on the board.”
Johnson says his posts were unexceptional in tone, but that they were deleted and he was then blocked from posting to the system, along with anyone else who asked why Johnson had been “booted.”
Retaliation was in order, says Johnson: “We started searching for ways to get back on their board. Also, by searching their site we were able to find all of the veggies’ e-mail addresses, and then someone on [another] board came up with actual addresses of the vegan board owners. This was quite enough information to totally destroy the veg-Nazis’ entire existence.”
“Many board people started posting what someone should do, could do, and how to do it without getting caught,” says Johnson. “It was quite impressive. We stacked up a few hundred posts that night and when the veggies saw what was going on they got the shit scared out of them. After that it got boring.”
Jeff Nelson vehemently denies that the vegetarians provoked the Subgun onslaught.
“That is total BS,” says Nelson. “We didn’t know anything about that site until May 10 when we checked our logs, long after these bozos had shown up on our boards. While some of the pro-gun people on VegSource apparently knew about the Subguns board, those people came over from those sites to us, not the other way around. No one from our site that I know of ever went there, except after the threats were made, to look at the place.”
“Any time people have freedom there’s a tiny percentage of those who will abuse it,” says Tom Bowers, the founder of Subguns.
“Basically, some overzealous individuals took it upon themselves to behave poorly on the Internet,” says Jim Keung, Bower’s counterpart at F.J. Vollmer. “When you have a medium such as the Internet and are dealing with millions of people, there are going to be actions from those who are less than civilized.”
Keung apologized publicly on the VegSource board for the actions of some of the pro-gun posters. As for Bowers, when asked whether it was possible that people who participated in his message boards had organized the destruction of the VegSource server, he first questioned whether the Web server had really been attacked.
“But if indeed that is what happened, then that is totally fucking chicken shit and out of line,” says Bowers. “Anybody who would do something like that because somebody disagrees with their opinion is a piece of shit.”
Bowers says his Web site offers one utterly unmoderated message board for general discussion of gun-related matters where “you can post any kind of offensive crap.” (That message board, which was operational throughout the period during which this article was researched, went offline at almost the exact same time Salon published this article. A note Bowers posted on another message board at his site offers no explanation but says “it’s going to be a few days” before the board is back up again.)
“It’s a service to the community,” he says. “There are very few places where you can go on the Net and put anything you want up there without any form of censorship at all. Unfortunately, because it is unmoderated, it is open to trolls,” says Bowers, referring to participants in an online discussion who post comments designed purposely to spark outrage. “We are getting hammered by the Nazis and the Antis [anti-gun advocates].”
Nazis? Few veterans of online discourse would dare contradict the truth of Godwin’s Law: the longer an online discussion grows, the more likely it is that a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler will be made. But back in 1990, when Mike Godwin formulated his law, few people (excepting Godwin himself) might have imagined that before the decade was over, actual Nazis would be raiding Web sites on a regular basis.
Perhaps it was just a twisted form of Web karmic retribution that sent the white power nuts from adolfhitler.com trolling over to Subguns. Certainly there was no shortage of absurd irony to be found in watching the Subgun regulars complain about jerkish behavior by outside invaders. The whole thing could also have been a farce — an up-to-date version of the infamous attack on the Usenet newsgroup rec.pets.cats by alt.tasteless back in 1993.
Or maybe the most cynical Subgun suspicions are true, and the so-called Nazis are in reality sneaky vegetarians impersonating “white gun owners.” In the aftermath of the destruction of the VegSource server, the chaos overrunning the Subguns board — a welter of forged posts, imposters and anonymous trolls — obliterated any chance to make sense out of the mess.
You never really know what’s going on out there in the uncharted wastelands of the Web, anyway. Hitler, guns and veggies; fakes, frauds and trolls: Life on the Net often seems baroque and bizarre, weirdly unrepresentative of how real life works.
But all too often, online explosions can be traced back to offline catastrophes. A massacre here, an annihilated Web server there — it’s all connected.
And it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
In the utopian vision of virtual community, more communication can only be a good
thing. But maybe more communication
between pissed-off people will just lead to heightened levels of outrage. As
ever more people flood into cyberspace seeking affirmation for their own
world-views, whether twisted or angelic, peaceful coexistence may be a mirage. What if the future of online discourse is one big melee — nasty, brutish and endless?
Tech-fluent, community-oriented, untiringly committed to work, work, work, the white-hot business magazine Fast Company is one of a handful of artifacts you would have to put in your cultural time capsule of the 1990s. If you had time to make a time capsule, which — silly me! — of course you don’t. You’re too busy Building Your Brand, Creating Your Wow Project, Joining the Free-Agent Nation.
Fast Company understands this. And that’s why Fast Company is one of the smartest — and scariest — magazines around.
The National Magazine Award Fast Company received last month capped off an incredible first three years. The month before, Advertising Age named it Magazine of the Year; its ad pages jumped more than 50 percent in a year, and its circulation jumped from 100,000 to over 250,000. And like any hot start-up nowadays, it may cash in while the cash-in’s good; owner Mort Zuckerman is reportedly shopping the magazine around, possibly to Condi Nast or another empire.
Many of the reasons are no doubt old-fashioned: snazzy design, sensitivity to trends, solid, unflashy writing, inventive regular departments, talented artists and (especially) cartoonists. But what really distinguishes Fast Company from older business magazines like Business Week, Forbes and Fortune (disclosure: I’m a contributor to Fortune) is its relentless emphasis on what’s new in business: the effects of technology and reorganization on the pace of business (hence the name), the blurring of the lines between work and leisure and, especially, the changing relation and waning loyalties — dramatized in the last recession — between the individual and the company. And it knows how to speak its readers’ highly upper-cased, consultant-ized lingo: In the May issue alone, we read how to Overcome Our Strengths, to move Beyond the Learning Organization, to Write Our Money Autobiographies.
Above all, FC realizes that its readers want a buddy, a partner, not a sage counselor or detached journalistic observer. The magazine’s core support comes from intensely dedicated readers, thousands of whom have joined “Circles of Friends” — Fast Company local reader groups that have become the Rush Rooms of the end of the century for the committed new-economy businessperson. They want to know how to motivate workers in a tight labor market, how to work in teams without becoming invisible. They’d rather hear success stories than post-mortems. And they want their magazine to cheer them on — preferably with catchy slogans they can take back to their project teams (even if they’re contradictory: “Be a gardener, not a mechanic!” but “Don’t let your job run out of gas!”).
There’s good and bad in this relentlessly sunny, can-do attitude. Fast Company has actually carried out the idea of “creating community” that other mags pay lip service to. But its articles — particularly its attention-getting cover stories — sometimes romanticize disturbing aspects of the economy, taking a pile of lemons and pretending they’re lemonade. In 1997, former Al Gore speechwriter Daniel Pink christened America “Free Agent Nation,” heralding the spread of self-employment by noting the success of a slice of highly skilled, wired professionals — doing yoga by day in their nice living rooms — with scant attention to temps, the downsized and the uninsured. (“If there’s one place where these solo workers — these free agents — feel comfortable,” Pink writes in a recent
href="http://www.slate.com/diary/99-04-06/diary.asp?iMsg=2">Slate dialogue, it’s a high-end coffee shop.”)
Yet among its plugged-in target group, Fast Company is doing right. The surest measure: Its own name has become consultant-speak. “An expert at retaining and developing employees” told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel recently that at a “Fast Company,” managers “guide, energize and excite” (rather than boss around) employees. “A Fast Company creates a place employees call ‘home,’” he says. Fast Company the magazine, concludes the Sun-Sentinel, is “more than a magazine … [it's] a metaphor.”
Not just a magazine but a metaphor: That’s the sort of thing you hear about Fast Company. It’s not just a magazine, it’s a community, a movement, a philosophy. You could dispute these descriptions, but the mag has the good sense to make sure people say them. For while these may be the better of bad times for publishing, one thing the wise periodical damn sure does not want to be called today is “a magazine.”
But the key to Fast Company is really this: It’s not just a magazine, it’s a consultant. (Ironically, one of its best features is the “Consultant Debunking Unit” column, which zaps a different consultant catch phrase each issue.) The May issue trots out a classic business metaphor, quizzing chess master Bruce Pandolfini for 10 deep-sounding slogans for the conquering king. “To gain space, you usually have to sacrifice time.” And “When you can’t determine whether to accept or decline a sacrifice, accept it.” (Inexplicably, the magazine omits “Don’t surround yourself with yourself” and “Take a straight and stronger course to the corner of your life.”)
This sounds like a throwback to the Sun-Tzu-ism of yore, but really Fast Company’s philosophy is more egalitarian, less Great Leader-centered. Its game is more about teaching each pawn to move itself (uh, teaching each rook to castle itself? These metaphors are harder than they look). It’s an unlikely mix of every-brand-for-himself mercenariness and team spirit: advancing your company’s interests by advancing your own. At least in theory. The subtext, as in business guru and FC poster boy Tom Peters’ famous cover story, “The Brand Called You,” is that the company would just as soon gut you as look at you; remember that, and everyone’s happy. Peters contributes the mag’s current cover story, “The Wow Project,” approaching project management in the same vein. The point of a Wow Project, Peters says, “is not to do a ‘good job’” — love those scare quotes — “of managing the project that the boss dumped into your lap. It’s to use every project opportunity … to create surprising new ways of looking at old problems.”
In other words, polish your resume first and do the assignment second. Live each work day like it’s your last. I can’t say that’s bad advice, but articles like this drive home just how shitless the early-’90s recession scared the white-collar work force, how the aftershocks affect even the most Pollyanna-ish assumptions of the boom era. After that brief, scary game of musical desks, we take every minute of work available, like guilty happeners across an overturned money truck, guiltily (or not) snatching up every stray dollar bill we can, not believing our good fortune will last, stuffing our pockets and scraping our knuckles until the cops come and shoo us away again.
Thus the 24/7/365 work-o-rama captured in an ad from the issue, for something called HotOffice 2.0 software: “Scott and Lisa are in the office working on the Johnson report … Ron’s in Miami Beach [working on a laptop] wishing he wasn’t working on the Johnson report.” This is a selling point — this is what someone has determined will make a Fast Company reader want to buy: Get HotOffice and you’ll never take a real vacation again!
Well, it’s only an ad. Fast Company didn’t make this world, any more than Fortune or Forbes did; it just identified and responded to it better than anyone else. (Even its leisure section is called “Neoleisure.”) And this hell-for-leather outfit does recognize the costs; last year it ran a cover package on “Getting a Life” and this spring included a section on balancing personal and professional life. But don’t expect all its readers to sign on that quickly: Though the section obviously touched a chord, one reader shot back, “To succeed today, you’ve got to become a maniac!”
“A Fast Company creates a place employees call ‘home.’” Increasingly, we’re turning home — and everywhere else — into a place employees call “work.” More power to Fast Company’s highly motivated followers if they enjoy it as much as they seem to. But it’ll be interesting to see what becomes of the magazine if the market tightens, if the readers ever weary of constant self-invention and of the prospect of 50 years of job insecurity, if its wired begin to grow tired. If the Free Agent Nation is put on waivers. If an economy of Fast Companies starts getting — God forbid — slow.
“One’s mailbox is one’s real portal — e-mail is still the killer app.” So says Craig Newmark, and he should know: As the soft-spoken proprietor (or “list owner” or “list mom”) of Craig’s List, he serves up e-mail daily to 7,600 subscribers on 17 mailing lists about the San Francisco Bay Area.
Where words like “portal” and “killer app” swarm, companies with business plans are rarely far behind. So it should not be surprising to discover that a host of new firms are looking to commercialize your in box — to put ads on your e-mail and introduce direct marketing into your mailing lists and e-mail communities.
A number of fledgling startups, such as Topica, Onelist and eGroups are working to harness the power of mailing lists — enabling marketers to insert their ads into even the smallest mailing-list communities. At the same time, these companies are working from a benevolent belief that they can enable community-building with easy-to-use tools that allow even the newest of newbies to become a “list mom.” Let a thousand ad-riddled communities bloom!
“Mailing lists were one of the last areas that hadn’t been exploited — though I’m sure there are other areas that we haven’t thought of yet, and marketers will soon flock there too,” says Scott Paterson, senior partner at the eScribe mailing list archiving service. “There’s potential for a lot more growth, and a lot of interest in direct advertising.”
Mailing lists are one of the Internet’s oldest communications methods, and one of the most simple — all you need is a collection of e-mail addresses united by a common purpose and one forwarding address. A mailing list can be the weekly newsletter that CNET sends out to half a million readers — or just a group of five or 10 relatives who keep up via e-mail. The number of mailing lists online is generally estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, sending millions upon millions of e-mails flying through the ether every day.
But despite their online ubiquity, mailing lists have typically been plagued by technical hurdles. Mailing list programs like majordomo or listserv required potential list operators to learn a series of arcane e-mail-based commands and to set up a server to run the list. As Mark Fletcher, CEO of Onelist, puts it, “If you wanted to run a mailing list, you had to be a nerd.”
Getting members on and off the list could be equally difficult. And to top it all off, you had to know where to find those mailing lists in the first place — a daunting task, since the best mailing lists were scattered across the Net and were rarely listed in directories. Even the mailing list software that did attempt a Web-based interface, such as Lyris, was too expensive or technically advanced for average people.
Enter Onelist, eGroups, Topica and a host of smaller mailing list services (often called listhosts) that have launched in the last year. Each of these startup companies offers comparable services: free mailing list tools and hosting in a Web interface, enabling just about anyone to set up a community-cum-mailing list in the space of just a few minutes, along with enormous directories of mailing lists you can join.
Month-old Topica, for example, allows members to set up and monitor their mailing lists through a series of easy Web-based tools. List owners can determine whether their new communities will be moderated or archived, can remove individual list members with the click of a button, create headers and footers, and so on. You can even import an already existing mailing list into the Topica service. List members, in turn, can find and track mailing lists via the Topica Web site, search mailing list archives and easily get on and off new lists. Think of it as a Dejanews or Hotmail-type service for mailing lists.
Explains Topica CEO Ariel Poler, “We started Topica because I participate in mailing lists and it became clear that the infrastructure was very primitive — there was an opportunity to make life easier for owners and subscribers. Our focus is not on helping to create new lists, though we allow it, but helping existing owners and subscribers have a better experience.”
Onelist and eGroups, both launched in the early months of 1998, offer similar services; although both offer further community functions, such as Onelist’s file sharing service or eGroups’ calendar and instant messaging systems. Other Web-based mailing list services, such as Reference.com and eScribe, focus primarily on archiving material for previously existing mailing lists — turning mailing lists into information databases.
“We give all this power — the power of creating a list — to everybody. We allow them to define what type of community they want,” explains Fletcher. “With communities, the more the merrier.”
Beyond such utopian visions, more, merrier mailing lists also means more profit for these mailing list services. Visitors to the Web sites are, not surprisingly, faced with banner ads; but more significantly, every e-mail on every mailing list that operates through Onelist or eGroups has an ad tacked to the bottom (although Topica does not currently include e-mail ads, it plans to do so soon). The ads are tailored, supposedly, to coordinate with both the mailing lists’ topics and the individual members’ personal profiles (which members provide when they sign up). Considering the volume of e-mail involved, the potential for direct marketing is staggering.
Says CEO Martin Roscheisen of eGroups, “Our offering is highly targeted. We have 120,000 highly subject-specific affinity groups; we know which people are interested in which groups and we can target across those lists, who they are (through their zip codes) and what they are interested in.” Venture capitalists apparently believe in the potential profits: According to a recent Red Herring article, the top three contenders in this field are backed by big money from such Silicon Valley heavyweights as August Capital, Sequoia Capital and CMGI.
But even though the ads may be “targeted,” not everyone is excited about the idea of turning their e-mail-based communities into marketing venues. Veteran list owners, who run the biggest mailing lists, are notoriously picky about what they will and won’t allow in their communities. eScribe decided to leave ads out of e-mail after hearing list owners’ complaints, as Paterson explains: “We find that list owners really don’t like to have anything inserted into their mailings — although they have no problem with banner advertisements appearing in their list archives on the eScribe Web site.” Even eGroups allows list owners to pay $4.95 a month to keep the solicitations off their lists, and Topica promises that the e-mail ads will be an “opt-in” option for list owners.
Accepting someone else’s ads also eliminates the possibility of profiting off your own content. One list owner who is concerned about these services is Randy Cassingham, author of the This Is True humor list, which goes out to 158,000 members every week. He has been selling ads on his mailing list for several years, which — along with books based on his content — are his sole source of income. Once you sign on to an ad-supported list host, “you’re basically now an advertising vehicle for someone else,” explains Cassingham. “Someone else is getting what may have been your profits — and, depending on the ad, you don’t have control over what is being advertised.”
Arguably, many list owners may not care about profits, especially since the average size of lists on these services is between 30-40 members — not exactly independently viable commercial ventures. But there’s also the issue of archiving content. Since most of these mailing list services will permanently archive every flame war, diatribe and emoticon that passes through the lists, your quick-fingered retorts on a private list can be archived for all eternity — even visible to members of the general public, if the list owner’s whims dictate.
Information-based mailing lists may make valuable databases, but even more mailing-list discussions are casual and off the cuff. As a dubious Craig Newmark explains, “Mailing lists are a bottoms-up, unpolished way of communicating. They have a casual atmosphere, which encourages you to say what you’re thinking. No matter how smart we are, now and then we say something we regret.” Would that unpolished spontaneity be lost if people knew their words were being archived?
The archiving of content also brings up issues of intellectual property. Says Cassingham, “I’m one of the people who wants to keep very tight control of my content — I consider it long-term-value intellectual property. Every year I put my columns in a book. If the online archive is easily available, why would they need to buy my book?”
Topica even claims rights to the content that passes through the service — as the terms of service put it, Topica is granted license and redistribution rights to “any material you transmit through Topica’s Service, including subscriber lists or content.” Poler explains that Topica is just trying to protect itself from copyright infringement claims, and promises that it will be rewritten to be less harsh. But it still brings up troubling questions about who owns the contents of a mailing list published by a commercial service. What if your flame wars were to be licensed to other Web sites for the amusement of the masses? It may be a far stretch, but it’s a possibility, especially when a company is amassing such vast amounts of content.
Perhaps the biggest concern of all is that these mailing list services will unwittingly assist spammers — making it easier to both grab e-mail addresses from mailing lists, and to import e-mail addresses into a mailing list for the purpose of spamming. Most of the major list hosting services have prominent anti-spam policies and have put e-mail verification in place; nonetheless, Fletcher says they still have problems with “list owners” who set up Onelist accounts in order to send spam.
The directories of mailing lists surely make it easier both to start and find good mailing lists than ever before — but perhaps it’s too easy. How many millions of mailing lists does the world need? If you were to scroll through the directories of mailing lists in these services, there’s an awful lot of repetition — such as the 1,000 genealogy lists in OneList — and an awful lot of “communities” that are simply new places for porn enthusiasts to swap smutty snapshots. The truly valuable lists — like This Is True or Craig’s Lists — could be lost in the wash of Leonardo di Caprio fan clubs, “AflirtsDream2″ mailing lists and baseball team newsletters. It’s difficult to determine from a brief description just how interested in a particular list you might be.
Still, despite the questions that these services raise, they seem to be making many list owners ecstatic. Vince Sabio, a professional “list mom” who hosts a dozen mailing lists, including his own 60,000 member-strong HumourNet list, is thrilled by the new list hosting services.
“I routinely have people asking me how to set up a mailing list, and I used to have a long piece of stationery that I sent them explaining how to do it. Now I just point them to Topica,” he says. He is moving most of his lists to Topica himself, and has even joined its team of list-owner advisors in order to turn his own wish-list items into a reality.
At the very least, the list host services have taken great leaps toward making list ownership more egalitarian, rather than a privilege for the technically savvy. As Sabio waxes rhapsodic, “We’re really all working toward this greater good — this concept of a faster, better, more effective means of communicating over the Net. From a long-term list owner perspective, that’s really a beautiful thing.”
Yahoo buys GeoCities — pop-up ads and all
In this week’s boffo Internet acquisition, Yahoo has purchased GeoCitiesin a stock swap valued at $3.5 billion. The companies are proudly adding uptheir impressive combined traffic figures; the market analysts are debatingthe deal’s financial pluses and minuses. But what about the rest of us users?
Yahoo has long been the Web’s most popular site (rivaled today only byAmerica Online), in good part because its design respects users: Pages are”light” and fast to download, the design is clean and advertising isreasonably unobtrusive. On the other hand, GeoCities — the company thatgives away free Web pages and calls the result “community” — is, asJanelle Brown’s recent Salon feature documented, one of the Web’s most heavily commercializedzones, full of inconsiderate “pop-up” ads that open in new browser windowswithout asking your permission.
Will Yahoo’s low-key approach moderate the dollars-before-usersGeoCities approach? Or will GeoCities’ pushiness infect Yahoo? In thecoming weeks and months, follow the “pop-up” windows.
— Scott Rosenberg
SALON | Jan. 29, 1999
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Linux got game
It’s getting monotonous — the drumbeat of good news for Linux just keepsrolling on. The latest tidbit to send open source fans into an ecstaticfrenzy is a press release from astart-up company called Loki Entertainment Software. The company announced Wednesday that it will be creating a Linux version of the upcoming game Civilization: Call to Power. (Both versions are due for spring release.)
Call to Power is being touted as the third major release in the hugelypopular line of Civilization games (though it should be noted that the creator of Civilization, Sid Meier, has no involvement with it). The inability to play state-of-the-art games under Linux has long plagued Linux-lovers desperate to completely turn their backs on Microsoft.Sure, they can use Corel’s WordPerfect for their word processing needs, or edit images with the open source GIMP instead of Photoshop. But if they want to playStarcraft or Unreal or any other brand new computer game (and, beinginveterate geeks, this is of course something that they dearly desire to do), they still need to boot up Windows every now and then.
Scott Draeker, CEO of Loki, is billing the Linux version of Civilization:Call to Power as the first game marketed for the open-source platform. PeterKarpas, a product manager for Civilization at Activision, calls it the”first triple-A” game for Linux. Linux fans see theannouncement as a hopeful portent of more good game things to come.
Draeker concedes that keeping up with the latest developments in gamingtechnology will be “non-trivial” for Linux developers, but he is confidentthat in the long term, the gaming future belongs to Linux.
“In the future,” says Draeker, “you will see that the same game will runfaster on Linux on the same hardware than it will run on Windows. Linuxeventually will become a superior gaming platform, on technical grounds …It’s not really a matter of keeping up. We’re going to leave them in thedust.”
Maybe so. In the meantime, though, the real winner is Activision. LokiEntertainment is taking on all the expenses of developing and publishing theLinux version of Civilization: Call to Power. From Activision’s point ofview, just the buzz generated by the Linux announcement is a marketing coup for the game, regardless of what platform it will run on.
“It’s a no-lose deal for us,” says Karpas. “It’s all win.”
— Andrew Leonard
SALON | Jan. 28, 1999
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What is Netscape on?
America Online seems to cherish its image as a home for squeaky-clean family fun — from those earnest ads featuring apple-cheeked kids to the company’soutspoken anti-porn stance. So we can’t help wondering whatthe folks in Virginia think of the ad campaign for Netscape, their latestacquisition.
The ad’s caption reads “Go from the dance floor to the trading roomfloor in your pajamas.” It intercuts two images: a melange of busy stockbrokersand a group of sweaty, half-naked kids in the midst of some dance-floorcontortions. The catch: The dancers appear to be in the throes of anecstatic drug high, complete with wildly dilated pupils.
When asked whether the choice of drugged-out ravers was intentional,and what the message therein might be, Netscape Netcenter director ofmarketing Lynn Carpenter said, “It’s stock photography, so Ican’t comment on whether they are on drugs. It certainly was not ourintent … they’re kids having fun at a dance club in Majorca.” The picturewas chosen, she says, for its “stopping power.”
The ad’s copy promises that Netcenter is “where you get all the toolsyou need to do all the things you want online.” The print ad is part of alarger TV campaign that will roll out this week using similarly contrasting images — rugby players and ballet dancers, for example. The intent, saysCarpenter, is to remind consumers that Netscape’s Netcenter is a differentkind of portal that empowers visitors to find their own kind of fun.
We certainly hope that Netscape’s tools will enable us to have as muchfun as those kids appear to be having.
— Janelle Brown
Imagine the world’s largest community — a place where millions of people converse daily in civilized tones about everything from cereal to Camus. A place free of spam, porn, come-ons and flame wars. A place, in fact, where your thoughtful ruminations might actually be rewarded with prizes.
Is this some new, gated online space requiring an annual membership fee? Nope — it’s the new vision some entrepreneurs have for Usenet, the Net’s oldest and most anarchic interactive zone.
The last year has seen a burst of products designed to tame Usenet into a consumer-friendly product: from the explosive growth of pioneer Deja News to more recent products like Talkway and Realize. These Web-based commercial services are implementing everything from personalization to collaborative filtering to make Usenet a warm, friendly place where novices will want to participate.
As Talkway founder Richard Simoni puts it: “We want to make Usenet really accessible and really approachable: We don’t want it to be a techie haven where nerds like me can talk about their little nerd interests. We want it to be an actual consumer product.”
Usenet was founded in 1979 as a bulletin board system for Unix programmers; today, by one count, there are at least 65,000 newsgroups, last month alone hosting nearly 10 million posts by 1.2 million people. Though technically Usenet exists as a sort of parallel network, socially it is the backbone of the Internet — the most rudimentary yet inherently interactive community.
Yet for years people have been talking about its demise. It may be huge, but it’s also a garbage-filled and abstruse system that hasn’t changed much since its inception, and it certainly hasn’t grown as fast as its baby sibling, the Web.
Consider the hurdles that newsgroup neophytes have to overcome: Until recently, reading Usenet meant downloading a client program, configuring it to communicate with one of the “news servers” that handles Usenet traffic and deciphering a mire of directories before eventually stumbling across a newsgroup that was both relevant to your interests and trafficked by humans. Then, of course, you would have to wade through the spam, flame wars and pornographic solicitations. Compare that to the relevance and ease of joining, say, a moderated forum on CNN.com, and it’s no surprise that people have been predicting Usenet’s death.
“My overall view on this is that Usenet, the newsgroups, never really evolved out of the old Internet interfaces,” says Eric Horvitz, who is researching Usenet at Microsoft. “It’s this arcane world still that’s not really friendly to a majority of consumers. It’s like the ham radio users, the CB users of the Internet.”
But the new Usenet companies are convinced that Usenet can be saved from ham radio’s fate. Since Usenet is a system without owners or real authorities, it’s not likely that the infrastructure is going to change any time soon; but they believe that a commercial interface might be the key to morphing Usenet from niche market to mass market.
The cleanliness does comes at a cost. After all, these are all commercial services, invented by companies that firmly plan on making a profit from advertisements and e-commerce and premium subscription services. There are certainly people who like Usenet’s wild and woolly ways, and wouldn’t like to see the chaos tamed by profit-oriented companies.
But the advantage of their approach, the companies say, is that they are working with the interface, not within Usenet itself — you’ll always have the option of dredging up an old-fashioned newsreader and facing Usenet without filters and ad banners. As Simoni puts it, “Usenet has been seen as a tough nut to crack: You can’t post ads in there without getting flamed, and the culture of the past was that commercial activity was discouraged. But we’re getting around that by keeping the commercial activity within our service and not putting it in Usenet proper. That way everyone gets the best of both worlds.”
Deja News has led the way in bringing Usenet to the masses. It revolutionized Usenet by archiving conversations back to two years (formerly, few servers archived more than two weeks) and making them all available via a zippy Web search engine. But Deja News’ growth exploded at the end of 1997, when the company retooled itself as more of a personalized “discussion network,” allowing people to post to Usenet via the Deja News Web site. Today, Deja News claims more than 5 million users.
Without a doubt, Deja News is attracting a whole new audience to Usenet. In fact, many of the people who now use Deja News aren’t even aware that they are reading Usenet: Many just think they’re reading the discussion forums of Deja News. “I would say that about half, maybe a little bit more, of our users have also accessed Usenet by other methods, using software of some kind,” says David Wilson, vice president of marketing for Deja News. “But the other approximate half use Deja News only. And it’s been moving more and more towards Deja News becoming the sole access point for our users.”
Marc Smith, who tracks Usenet usage with his Netscan project, says that Deja News has had a tremendous impact on the sheer number of Usenet posts, but the ease-of-use in fact hasn’t necessarily fomented more community. “The [time] cost used to keep certain people out and certain people in, because after you’d put time and effort into a group it was hard to transfer that elsewhere,” he says. “These tools allow you to walk up to Deja News, type something in and messages pop out. You don’t even know anything about the group; you find the message, get the value and leave. It’s the difference between a small town and a city: I’m more anonymous and my connection and ties to the group are curtailed.”
Deja News has provided some personalized tools to try to encourage community growth: offering a “My Deja News” service with spam-free e-mail accounts and personal hot lists, and allowing users to start their own forums. But perhaps the biggest hurdle to encouraging users to get involved in the Usenet community is the quality of discussion itself. Who, after all, wants to plunge into newsgroups that are peppered with flame wars, puerile arguments and pointless questions and dominated by a few people on soapboxes?
This is the issue that the new collaborative filtering tools, like Talkway and Realize, are trying to solve. Their solution is, simply, to raise the bar on conversation.
Like Deja News, 4-month-old Talkway is a Web-based entrance to Usenet, with personalized accounts and a search engine plus a Yahoo-like organizational system that converts the official names of newsgroups (say, “comp.sys.mac.general”) into comprehensible ones (“General information on Macintosh”). Talkway has brought in commerce partners, so an array of buttons allows you to buy products that are related to certain newsgroups. But Talkway also allows users to self-police their newfound communities by voting on the quality of each post; idiotic posts can, quite simply, be filtered right out of the conversation.
Part of this system is straightforward: Your personalized account allows you to filter out posts by person or keyword, so that you’ll never have to see the posts by that irritating bigot or read debates about a subject that doesn’t interest you. Talkway has also, however, implemented a complex collaborative filtering system; members can rate the quality of posts as spam, adult, flame or great — if enough people vote a message as, say, “flame,” and you turn your filter on to eliminate all flames, then you’ll never see that message.
“There are so many people and so much information in Usenet that it’s hard to deal with the infoglut,” explains Richard Simoni, Talkway co-founder. “There’s different ways of dealing with that problem, and one way to do it is leverage the value of the community itself to help you decide what’s valuable to you.”
Why would someone want to take the time to rate messages, though? In comparison to other text-based Usenet newsreaders — which despite their complexity are often quick to load — most of the Web interfaces sacrifice speed to a friendly graphic design: Not only does it take time to load and scroll through posts, but you have to pause to vote on each message.
Realize, another Usenet product that launched in early September, has a collaborative filtering system similar to that of Talkway, but is trying to get people to contribute ratings by offering incentives. Realize — which only deals with the 50 most popular newsgroups — rewards posters with Qy Points, which can be redeemed for frequent-flier miles, product discounts or donations to charity if they demonstrate “valuable contributory behavior to online message boards.” It’s the virtual equivalent to a gold star: If you rate lots of messages or if your messages are rated positively by other members, you are rewarded with points.
But the primary flaw in collaborative filtering is that it requires a critical mass to work: Until many people are consistently participating in the system, filtering results will be spotty. Realize’s system requires six to nine ratings before a “bad” message is filtered out; additionally, any unrated messages are automatically filtered out. So unless a good number of people are diligently rating all messages — turning their filter off, in fact, so that they can see the new, unrated messages — no one using the filter will be able to view anything at all.
Although Talkway and Realize claim to have 100,000 and 10,000 users respectively, both admit that their systems don’t work right yet, and won’t until they have more participants. After all, 100,000 users is a paltry number when compared to the vastness of the millions of Usenet messages that each need multiple ratings.
But if collaborative filtering does work, what kind of impact could that have on Usenet discussions? “Rating messages” is a certain kind of censorship — albeit one that is less top-down than the “cancelbots” or automated programs that have long roamed Usenet with orders to kill spam and porn. Fringe or controversial posts might be whisked out of view by a system that relies on lowest-common-denominator voting. What, for example, constitutes porn? All it could take is 10 conservative voters to decide that a frank discussion about sex should be hidden from view.
Then there are going to be the mavericks who bend the rules. Explains Marc Smith of Netscan, “It’s a problem if we have one huge pot of collaborative filtering, because we will have opinion without accountability. No one will know who voted what, and that means that people will spam the filter. If it becomes the case that filters get critical mass and change what is seen, those who want to be seen will go out and vote until they are seen.” Or vice versa: Enemies could potentially “kill” each others’ posts by voting multiple times. As Smith puts it, “If you want to live in a Disney-filtered universe, OK. Just don’t make me live in it.”
The collaborative filtering companies are aware of these pitfalls, and emphasize that you can turn the filters off, if you like, to check up on what you’re missing. But will people take the extra time to double check that they aren’t losing out on a mind-expanding discussion?
Eric Horvitz of Microsoft, who is also researching a collaborative filtering system for Usenet, is concerned about just this: “A bad collaborative filtering solution might hide interesting parts of the Internet because users will come to rely on the tool. At Microsoft we’re interested in probing pitfalls of various kinds. We’re looking at techniques of expanding what you might be looking at instead of shrinking and focusing it. There’s always a danger [the filters] might not take you to a place you would want to go if you had time to think about what you wanted. There are tremendous trade-offs.”
Despite these hurdles, the new Usenet companies believe that their system could eventually transform Usenet into a less chaotic and more relevant community. Michael Ginn, president of Realize, postulates: “Our hope is over the long term we can help catalyze a shift in Usenet from a completely anarchistic system that sometimes does or doesn’t work to a system that naturally and organically tends to address the interests of people within the group.”
And if the promise of a more approachable Usenet draws more people into the fray, Usenet could conceivably grow even vaster than it is today. More people might be willing to join in if they can contribute in small ways — by voting and quietly helping shape a group — instead of having to post copiously in order to participate.
As Smith puts it, “This could be the second coming of Usenet.”
