Re: Internet Advertiser's Blacklist

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Fri, 16 Dec 1994 07:01:19 -0800

> >Have we thought of balloting across all newsgroups and publishing the
> >results.
>
> Unfortunately, attempting that without sufficient coordination will be
> negated by the CancelMoose[tm] (apparently?). Also, in the newsgroups, the
> participants come and go (t.s. eliot).

Trying to poll the "regulars" in even a single newsgroup or list
to get their permission or approval of a controversial policy
is disruptive in itself. I don't think this should be initiated
by outside parties. Generally, unless a newsgroup or list
has established a policy that allows advertisting, or is in
a heirachy like biz.* with different policies on commecial
content, you should leave it alone (or use limited unobtrustive
measures --- but that doesn't scale well and assumes the presence
of good judgement.)

I've conducted a straw-vote (on anonymous posting) in a newsgroup
in which I am a "regular", and even with general agreement from
the community, it was a lot of work to do it.

Remember, one does not have a right to advertise where one does
not pay the bills. USENET newsgroups are paid for by the sites
that carry the group. Unilaterally "hijacking" the content of
a group is a violation of the social contract, as it interferes
with the ability of sites that carry less than a full newsfeed
to choose what they want. (Creating new groups (especially
in new hierachies) or new e-mail lists does not face this
problem.)

(USENET is not the Internet, and has not been _directly_ government
funded, unlike NSFNET. The adversion to USENET spam has more to do
with the costs it imposes than a history of NSF AUPs.)

I think there _is_ often a real community in unmoderated newsgroups
that is not evident to the casual reader: there's not much disagreement
among long-time posters in identifying regulars. (Some groups like
"personals" or Q&A groups are mostly one-time posts.)

I wish the proposed market.* newsgroups had worked out (biz.* has
a more limited model of commerce.) I think there's no reason
NNTP can't be a transport medium for good advertising -- it just
needs newsgroups created with that in mind and sites willing to
carry them. One way to promote such newsgroups would be to
offer them on a number of sites with a read-only public-access
NNTP server or news to web gateway (along with some popular
non-commercial groups?) "Giving away" free news access could
be an interesting way to create "walk-in" traffic. (It might
be possible to provide longer-expiration archives of a modest
number of related groups talored to your market.)

If 10 "Internet malls" could carry a common set of newsgroups
and cooperate on cross-indexing they could form a more potent
virtual mall.

--
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu