grant@medio.com,
<URL:http://www.halcyon.com/grant/>
The project to get the newsgroup off the ground began in September, 1994, when Thomas Boutell began the discussion in the comp.infosystems.www.* newsgroups. At the time, there was no other reliable, easy way for people to publicize new and changing Web resources without clogging up the existing Web newsgroups. Many participants in those groups agreed that comp.infosystems.www.announce, a separate Usenet newsgroup just for those kinds of announcements, was long overdue. The specific arguments for and against the newsgroup's creation are beyond the scope of this paper; suffice it to say that there was much support and little resistance to the idea once the charter's details were hammered out.
The newsgroup creation process followed that initial proposal in the comp.infosystems.www.* groups. (Those familiar with newsgroups understand that deviation from precedent can result in a lot of bother for newsgroup proposers. In short, if the procedure deviates from the accepted schedule of discussion and voting, some news administrators will refuse to propagate a newsgroup and its posts, thereby limiting its distribution and effectively killing the group.) Interested people helped me hammer out the charter and determine backup moderators for the group, Glenn Davis (gdavis@infi.net) and Tim Pierce (twpierce@midway.uchicago.edu).
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome was to convince people that a moderator was necessary. I used three arguments to convince naysayers. First, there are several successfully moderated announce groups, comp.infosytems.announce notwithstanding--the one most similar to this group is comp.os.linux.announce. Second, an announce group has to have a high signal-to-noise ratio. That is, there should be few to no off-topic posts in the group. An unmoderated announce group may have unwanted follow-up threads or other messages in it. Soon, someone will post saying that an article was off-topic. The original poster follows up and accuses the other of policing the group. Someone new joins the flame war and calls on everyone to stop flaming and just post announcements. The group becomes unreadable and useless--it serves no different purpose than does comp.infosystems.www.misc.
And last, accuracy is important in an announce group. I wrote into the charter that one of the moderator's duties is to check every URL which someone wants to publicize to make sure it works. A broken URL will result in my sending the post back to the sender for correction. This procedure eliminates the correction posts found in the other Web groups, in comp.infosystems.announce, and, to a lesser extent, in comp.internet.net-happenings (the group whose moderator, Gleason Sackman, has posted many Web announcements despite the fact that many Web resources are not necessarily net-happenings). In short, having the moderator verify each announced URL makes the group a highly reliable place to get new Web information.
While the group was still in the voting process, I started to build the searchable archive for the group. This archive bridges any gap left between Usenet and the World-Wide Web. Updated at least once weekly, the archive allows users to search the entire archive of articles or search in only one month's worth of articles. If news articles at one person's site expire after a few days, then any missed announcements will be found in the archive within a week of being posted on the group.
The archive also provides links to other announcement services, including The NCSA What's New Page, Netscape Communication Corporation's What's New! listings, the comp.infosystems.www.announce newsgroup itself, and other resources.
The number of Usenet resources on the Web (most notably, lists of Frequently-Asked Questions, or FAQ's) has increased significantly in the last year. Thomas Fine maintains a list at Ohio State University (USA), an archive all Usenet FAQ's posted to the newsgroup news.answers.
Some newsgroups themselves are so popular that some of the regular participants have put together series of Web pages about them. The subjects range from the silly to the serious, from alt.devilbunnies to comp.lang.perl and comp.lang.python.
alt.devilbunnies is a newsgroup with a large following; the group receives about 100 to 120 posts per day [1] in the form of stories, plots, and other messages. The alt.devilbunnies Web page includes links to various participants' Web offerings, images, sounds, newsgroup archives, and the two versions of the newsgroup's FAQ. Finding the FAQ on the Web requires much less work than wading through all these posts to find it.
On the serious side, the Perl FAQ at Ohio State lists four Web sites users should access for further information. One of those sites includes a searchable database of newsgroup postings, links to other Web locations, and an extensive list of perl5 resources.
The newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.announce and its Web counterpart, the archive, will provide both Web providers and users with a reliable, timely way to publicize resources and hear about those resources soon after their availability. The distinctions between Internet, Usenet, and World-Wide Web are fading; and comp.infosystems.www.announce is one place where Web users can see the change every day.