Interactive Week is reporting that Deja.com is up for sale. The story says Deja wants to sell its Usenet archives and collaborative recommendation buying guide seperately.

This is more monumental than just another dotcom not meeting expectations. In the beginning (1979), before the web ever existed, usenix (usenet) was created as a sort of internet bulletin board. It experienced slow, yet exponential, growth for the first 10 years, but eventually exploded into gigabytes of new content a day.

• 1979 3 sites, 2 articles a day
• 1980 15 sites, 10 articles a day
• 1981 150 sites, 20 articles a day
• 1982 400 sites, 50 articles a day
• 1983 600 sites, 120
• 1984 900 sites, 225
• 1985 1,300 sites, 375 articles per day, 1+Megabyte per/day
• 1986 2,500 sites, 500, 2 MB+
• 1987 5,000 sites, 1000, 2.5 MB+
• 1988 11,000 sites, 1800, 4 MB+
• ...
• 1993 66,000 sites, 26,000, 65 MB+

People would use specific newsreading applications to access the newsgroups and they were entirely seperate from the web and from email. Over time, newsgroup reading and posting capability was added to mail clients (except Pine, which had NNTP capabilities much earlier on), and later there were posting gateways brought to the web, so people could use web-based remailers to post to newsgroups.

Somewhere around 1994 Altavista came along, one of the first comprehensive search engines, with the distinctive advantage that you could search both the web and usenet postings. Before this it was exceedingly difficult to find specific information in usenet because you would have to perform time-consuming local searches on individual newsgroups, and even then there were already over 20,000 newsgroups out there. Bringing search to usenet drastically changed its utility drastically. Before search, a newsgroup was a serial you would have to read every day in order to keep up, but afterwards it became a research tool. Where before you would post a question to a newsgroup and wait for a reply from an expert, now you would search for someone who already asked the question.

Later, full usenet gateways sprang up. In addition to incorporation into back-office tools for individual companies or institutions, a small handful of free major services started around 1996, one of which was dejanews. It's probably the last one to survive.

Wow, I was going to write a short post, but it turned into a big history lesson (and research session for me). I don't have time to write what would have to be at least 8 pages to do it justice, but the gist is that I believe that Deja's failure is the turning point for usenet. It will always have niche uses and devoted communities, but it's clear to me that knowledge transfer on the net will depend on web publishing tools. Be it by UBB, blogger, homestead, slashdot, epinions, evite, egroups, ebay, or good-old FTP, distributed information will go through the web and, sadly, usenet will atrophy...

If anyone has recent usenet usage stats, I'd love to see. I'm very interested to know if it's peaked in recent years, or if traffic is still climbing.

Agaon, sorry for the roughness of this 'report'. I just wanted to get it out and I was just a few keystrokes away from deciding to chuck the whole thing inthe intersts of "if you can't do it right.."

On the brighter side, research brought up a few interesting reads including The Virtual Community, The Development of the International Computer Network (1995), and the Usenet Access Guide. It's a really strange feeling to be nostalgic over usenet. I was still getting over being nostalgic over VAX BBSes, fidonet, ANSI and Hermes BBSes, pre-internet AOL (back when it was worthy of nostalgia), and ICB...

I wonder how long it'll be before we're nostalgic about the web.