Books and reading

For several years I've kept in touch with people who share similar literary interests by means of Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists. Now many ISPs are withdrawing their news service (it does require rather a lot of server space) and so traffic in the newsgroups has dropped off a lot, and I've lost contact with a lot of the people with whom I used to have interesting conversations in the newsgroups.

I've found an alternative way of keeping in contact, through Good Reads, where you can find me at http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw. But more on that later (see below).

For those who have suffered the fate of losing access to newsgroups, there is a free news server at news.eternal-september.org where you can subscribe to the various newsgroups.

My favourite newsgroups for books and reading are:

• alt.books.cs-lewis
• alt.books.inklings
• alt.books.beatgeneration
• rec.arts.books.tolkien

The Tolkien group still thrives, but the others have almost emptied of participants since some of the major ISPs stopped their nntp service.

If you click on those links, your web browser should automatically take you to your default newsreader, but if your ISP is one of those that no longer provides news (I bet they didn't reduce their subs for the reduced service) you will not be able to do much unless you set your news reader up to connect to a server like eternal-september.

There are also other newsgroups that are (or were) useful for those who like books and reading:

• rec.arts.books
• rec.arts.books.childrens
• alt.usage.english

Most of the better-informed participants in rec.arts.books took themselves off to a Facebook group called The Prancing Half-Wits, but the Facebook interface is clunky, and does not lend itself to interactive discussions the way newsgroups do. alt.usage.english continues to thrive, perhaps because many of the participants are a bit more computer-savvy than most, and know how to connect to alternative news sources.

For those interested in the Inklings (C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien & Co) I've started a mailing list called Neo-Inklings, which you can find at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eldil/. To subscribe to it, send e-mail to eldil-subscribe@yahoogroups.com, but it is worth also visiting the web site, as there are facilities for uploading files and photos, creating polls and databases and more. I've invited some of the former members of the alt.books.cs-lewis newsgroup to join us there. For those interested mainly in the works of Charles Williams rather than the other Inklings, there is a Charles Williams list called Coinherence-L.

There are also several web sites for book lovers to keep track of their books and make contact with others with similar interests. Three of the best-known are Bibliophil, LibraryThing and Good Reads. For various reasons I prefer Good Reads.

Good Reads

GoodReads is a combination of a book catalogue and a social networking site for books, and I think it works better than the others.

Like most social networking sites, you can add people as "friends", but in many social networks this is rendered useless by people wanting to add you as a "friend" when they don't know you, don't want to know you, share no common interests with you and you've never heard of them. It's a bit like regarding everyone in the phone book as a "friend" -- if everyone is your friend, then no one is.

But Good Reads provides a good way of seeing whether someone is likely to be your friend.

First you need to join, and enter some of the books that you have in your library or have read, starting with your favourites, but you can also add a few books that you really hate. Like other such sites, you are asked to rate and review them. When you've entered those books and rated them (with 1-5 stars), then you can look for friends. Find someone who owns some of your favourite books, look at their profile and click "compare books".

There you can see if they've read your favourite books, and what they think of them. It's expressed as a percentage. For example, with one of my friends (who sometimes reads my blog), it produced this result:

You and booklady have 21 books (or 7.27% of your library and 2.07% of her library) in common. Your tastes for those 21 ratings are 78% similar.

If it's over 70%, go to the next step, which is the "book compatibility test". This compares your ratings of some popular books in various genres, or if you've even read them. In this case my result was "Your compatibility with booklady is 63%."

If you have read some of those popular books, but haven't entered them and rated them, then do so, because it will make future comparisons easier.

So Good Reads is a good way to find and keep in touch with those with similar literary tastes.

Deathwatch: Usenet newsgroups

Usenet seems to be going into a terminal decline.

Several people on newgroups I read regularly have reported that their ISPs are dropping or severely curtailing newgroup service. Perhaps this should be called VSS - Value Subtracted Service. Maybe before it dies altogether someone could suggest an appropriate newsgroup for reporting on and rating ISPs and noting whether they are VSS or not.

Apparently the alt. newsgroups are particularly under threat, yet some of the ones I find most valuable are in the alt. hierarchy -- alt.usage.english and alt.obituaries, for example.

While my ISP (Telkom SA) hasn't made a definite announcement, Telkom's news server SAIX has deteriorated lately, and error messages like the following are common:

2008-06-24 11:40:52 PM Error reported by winsock driver: No response from server (timeout) (Error 10060): Connecting to news.saix.net.
2008-06-24 11:41:23 PM Error reported by winsock driver: No response from server (timeout) (Error 10060): Connecting to news.saix.net.

Failed connects are more common than successful ones, and it sometimes takes me two days to download headers, another two days to collect the marked bodies, and another two to post replies, so the replies can sometimes take up to a week (and sometimes more) to be posted on the net. Some newgroups, like soc.culture.south-africa, remain inaccessible to me, and have been for more than a year. I can post there, but I cannot read any posts unless they are crossposted to other newsgroups (za.misc still works).

As a result of this I, like many others, have taken to blogging if I have something serious to say. Blogging seems to be faster and more reliable, but in many ways it is less satisfactory. Even more than News, blogging is an inherently one-to-many (and therefore self-centred) medium. People can comment, but comments are directred to the original post, and there is not the same interaction among commenters.

Sometimes I long for the good old days of Fidonet and other Fido Technology Networks (FTNs). FTN echo conferences were a true many-to-many medium, better even than newsgroups.

But it seems that we are about to lose even newsgroups, and for all our technology that should make communication easier, genuine conversation will be taken from us, and we will be reduced to soap-box oratory and heckling, which is basically what blog comments are.

Yes, I know it is possible to access newsgroups through the clunky web interface at Google Groups, but it really is clunky and more hassle than it's worth. I'd rather switch to mailing lists if newsgroups are no longer available (even though mailing lists consume more bandwidth and net resources).

Written at 12:10 am on 25 June 2008, South African time, though when it will actually be posted on Usenet is anyone's guess.

And I'll post it on my blog too!

Posted in

alt.obituaries
alt.religion.christian.east-orthodox
alt.usage.english
net.general
net.history.general
soc.culture.south-africa
za.misc
za.net.misc
alt.genealogy

Facebook - caution or conspiracy?

I've already commented that I've found Facebook too much to cope with Notes from underground: I can't face Facebook any more!. Since they introduced third-party apps it changed from being a useful tool into a burden and a distraction and I now look at it maybe once a fortnight or less often.

Then Anja Merret blogged about it, pointing out that the terms of service implied that you virtually relinquished copyright to anything you posted on Facebook, so that if, for example, a professional photographer posted some of their work on Facebook, Facebook could use it for advertising, selling or anything else. Several commentators said or implied that Anja Merret was succumbing to conspiracy theories and that the threat to privacy on social networking sites like Facebook was overrated, but it seems that Syria takes these threats seriously, and has banned Facebook, seeing it as too vulnerable to Israeli espionage.

When Facebook started, it became popular because it did one thing, and did it well. It was a tool for students in tertiary educational institutions to keep in touch with their friends. The first time I tried to join it I wasn't allowed. Retired staff members of such institutions simply weren't eligible.

Then Facebook opened to the general public. It had some uses, but it also had some severe shortcomings. One of the shortcomings was the idea of "networks", which worked fine when it was limited to academic institutions -- one could limit a group discussion forum to members of a particular institution, for example. But when it was opened to the general public, the concept needed to be rethought, and it hasn't been. If, for example, one wants to have a group for the South Africa network, members of the Pretoria network can't join it The Pretoria network should be part of the South Africa network, the smaller being part of the large, but on Facebook it isn't.

Some people got carried away by Facebook. Some members of the rec.arts.books newsgroup on Usenet migrated to a Facebook group called "The prancing half-wits", which deprived the newsgroup of some of its best contributors, and made much of their discussion inaccessible. As a medium newsgroups are far better for interactive communication than web forums (even though they were originally intended for one-to-many communication rather than many-to-many), because navigating to the forum on Facebook is a much more complicated process, and there are too many distractions along the way. I check newsgroups at least once a day, but the Facebook forums I look at once in six months, if that often.

But the rot really set in when Facebook allowed third-party applications.

This diffused things too much, and instead of making it easier to keep in touch, made it more difficult. For example, there are several apps for recording books you have read. The result is that you may have several bookloving friends, each using a different app. Instead of keeping in touch, you are separated. But they will all invite you to join their app, so if you do, you would have to enter each book you read six times. I gave up. I'd rather use Bibliophil or LibraryThing for that. Their approach is to do one thing and do it well, rather than Facebook's clumsy and cumbersome "one size fits all".

Others are also jumping on to the social networking bandwagon. Plaxo, which was a synchronised address book tool, has expanded into a social network, and may do it better than Facebook, though their interface is a bit slow. But if there are too many social networks, things are likely to become just as diffused as when there are too many books applications on one of them. I still prefer Tribe.net, though it didn't take off like Facebook.

And for interactive communications, mailing lists and newsgroups still remain more effective than web forums, whether hosted by Facebook or anyone else. Even blogs are better in some ways for that. It's much easier to find what people have posted on blogs than to find what they have posted in Facebook forums.