Whuffie: one of the 25 notions for 2003 - QuickTopic bulletin board

I liked the "blogs as newsgroups" entry. I was pretty active in Usenet: moderating, maintaining FAQs and even operating an anti-abuse 'bot over the austin.* regional groups. What finally drove me away wasn't the spam, but the sociopathological individuals who are unable to operate in a community. Usenet is the last place they can go to rant and foam.

I remember watching the rising of blogs (individual and community) and thinking this is the future of online discussion. The one thing I miss is that Usenet--in the pre-Internet days--was inherently regionalized, given the mechanisms used to pass messages around. I wish there were more community weblogs with regional identity.