Peter Sinclair: Cultural history of net at stake with death of Deja

This is only a small tragedy.

It's not Shakespearian in its sweep and scope. Its dimensions are modest. Yet the death of Deja will sadden all those who, in the foreshortened timeframe of cyberspace, remember the net when it was young.

Deja News (as it was originally known) gave Usenet, the anarchic babble of the newsgroups, a graphical face back in 1995. It archived every thread in every group from that year on, becoming an often under-exploited but frequently useful adjunct to regular search engines.

Its vast archive of Usenet discussion, now swollen to 1.5 terabytes (1500Gb) - 500 million posts on more than 35,000 forums - has always been seen as a priceless socio-historical resource for researchers of the far future. Everything ever thought, rumoured or opined on the early internet was obsessively hoarded there.

Every current of human thought, from philosophy to scatology, found its way into Deja's immense searchable slush-pile.

And then it lost its way. It went portal-crazy, and in a monumental management miscalculation attempted to relaunch itself as a product-shopping service, de-emphasising Usenet and pasting up the sort of "special online offers" and digital coupons which made you want to click away in embarrassment.

And everybody did.

What on earth did they expect? Now they're trying to achieve a merger for their ill-conceived "Precision Buying Service"; and, more desperately, to sell off the family silver, the archive itself, to an unnamed buyer in order to stay afloat.

There is no longer any guarantee that this voluminous record will survive - AltaVista, which once maintained its own, appears to have quit the field - and Deja's attempts to convince the putative purchaser that there is a viable business model lurking somewhere in the archive are surely undermined by its own transparent desire to escape.

And how do you justify pouring capital into preserving material which nobody much is going to take a real interest in for the next hundred years or so?

A newcomer, Critical Path, is trying to market a much-smaller archive as Inscribe, a user-pays service for corporates; and has also acquired SuperNews, a once-free archiving service it is trying to commercialise as an outsourcer for ISPs. No help there.

Net historians can only hope for the distant thunder of hooves as some university or foundation gallops up in the role of white knight. For what is at stake is nothing less than the cultural history of computer networking, of the internet itself.

BOOKMARKS

MOST AWAITED: Napster for the Mac

As Napster fights for its life in a US federal court, Macsters can still make it to the party - and, wouldn't you know it, their interface is way ahead of the one PC users make do with. Bright new icons echo the vibrant colours of Apple's iMacs, plus you'll appreciate new features like the customisable tool-bar, dockable chat windows, a search history and drag-and-drop.

Napster was used to download 1.39 billion songs last month, so there'll be an awful lot of disgruntled surfers if the RIAA wins out.

Advisory: the fat lady has yet to open her mouth.

MOST QUIZZICAL: University of Waikato Library Quiz 2000

Now a fixture on the local web, this annual head-scratcher is back online from tomorrow. There'll be the usual set of 90 Mastermindish questions you have to answer by the end of February next year. Samples: What colour footwear do you associate with a place whose name means 'Field of Garlic'? Which band was once known as Levon & The Hawks?

Advisory: prizes promised but unspecified.

MOST ECONOMICAL: Wotif

The ungracefully named but - to judge by the savings I spotted - highly effective Aussie accommodation cost-cutter debuts in New Zealand. "People are too busy to waste time ringing around or waiting on phone queues. Now at the touch of a few buttons, they can search for the best short-term rates in either country, and book online immediately," says its CEO. Wotif.com has agreements with most major hotel chains on both sides of the Tasman and helps all concerned, traveller and tavern alike, by selling rooms that would otherwise go unused at standby room-rates.

Advisory: New Zealand coverage patchy so far, but it's early days.

MOST ERGONOMIC: Eatoni

Wireless application protocol (wap) is starting to flag, even in its native Europe, largely because of its wildly unsatisfactory interface. Put simply, a phone is a phone is a phone - it is not a true internet device, despite the wishful thinking of phone manufacturers, from whom the wap buzz originates almost entirely. Typing on a telephone keypad is a pain, but maybe Eatoni can ease it: "linguistically optimal predictive text-entry software makes the standard mobile telephone keypad as comfortable, fast, accurate, and versatile as a full typewriter keyboard." They're kidding, surely?

Still, check out LetterWise and WordWise, which even correct misspelled words and preset some of the more common.

Advisory: born-again wap.

Links:

Déjà

AltaVista

Critical Path

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)

Napster for Mac

University of Waikato Library Quiz

Wotif

Eatoni


petersinclair@email.com>