I’ve been hearing from Sport how he’s been able to reconnect with friends and discover new interests through Myspace groups. As usual, I was sceptical that Myspace could offer even a shadow of the richness of Usenet or the web (or even IRC) for things I’m interested in. As I’ve said before, I’ve been playing with this stuff for a long time and since a lot of Myspace users, (like AOL users before them) seem to be totally ignorany of Usenet, perhaps I should preface this post with a little history. I don’t claim authorship to any of this, in fact most of it is right from Wikipedia.

Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed bulletin board system (BBS). It is a distributed Internet discussion system… conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post e-mail-like messages (called “articles”) to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects.

Usenet was the initial Internet community and the place for many of the most important public developments in the commercial Internet. It was the place where Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web [4], Marc Andreesen announced the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag [5], which revolutionized the World Wide Web by turning it into a graphical medium.

Web-based archiving of Usenet posts began in 1995 at Deja News with a very large, searchable database. In 2001, this database was acquired by Google, who rebranded the archive as Google Groups.

Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to mailing lists, web forums and weblogs. The difference, though, is that Usenet requires no personal registration with the group concerned (subscription is necessary only to keep track of which articles one has already read, and that information need not be stored on a remote server), that archives are always available, and that reading the messages requires no mail or web client, but a news client (included in most modern e-mail clients).

I like Irish and Celtic music, and even though Myspace was built with music in mind, providing special sections and tools for bands to promote themselves and network with others – it seemed unlikely to me that Myspace would have any groups dedicated to this kind of music. I’ve read in several places that the average user’s age on Myspace is 13. Whether or not this is true is beside the point – Irish and Celtic music is not mainstream.

While I’ve found quite a number of cool Celtic bands like Fathom that have individual pages on Myspace, these almost invariably have a prominent link back to their real (and usually better) website, and a huge list of comments which amount to little more than advertisements from other bands that then provide links back to their real websites, etc. I was told that there were groups of people on Myspace who shared a common interest and that groups was the place to find them discussing their hobbies. I was interested if a community of people who enjoyed Irish and Celtic music existed in Myspace and how that group compared to other types of communities I’ve found online. Myspace provides a convenient method of finding new, related bands (and, I suppose – people), but could it deliver on a community user experience?

The short answer was, well – no. I’ll admit that I was not exhaustive in my search and I remain open to being steered in the right direction by some knowledgeable person but here’s what happened: First thing I did was click on the Myspace groups link. Things looked promising: Music (277959 groups). That’s a lot right? Clicking the link brought me to a webpage with the following heading:

<br /> Listing 1-10 of 3000 1 2 3 4 5 >> of 300 Next ><br />

Wait, 3000? Then it says “of 300″? What happened to the other 274959 of them? Or is it 277659? Can’t they do simple math? I thought perhaps my use of Firefox and my javascript blocking plugins were messing with the results. I know that Myspace runs on Windows Servers which are notorious for messing up non-IE users (seemingly puposefully). So I logged into work and ran IE to try again. Same result. I still find it hard to believe that a site that is as popular as Myspace could have something so obviously broken in such an obvious spot and not be fixed immediately, but it appears to be so.




Well, no matter – there’s a handy search box there so I typed in ‘celtic’ to help narrow down the list. Things were looking pretty bleak already at this point. If there are only 4 groups on all of Myspace with the Name or keyword as ‘celtic’, and none of them having anything to do with music, I was clearly not going to find a very thriving community of like minded folks here. I thought maybe the search thing was broken, after all the drop down list on the search reads ‘Afghanistan’ as default. I changed it to United States and researched. It found no groups. Stupid, confusing, broken, Myspace BS.





I decided to search for ‘irish’ instead. This time I was a bit luckier, as I got a whopping 4 results. One was private, so obviously I’m not wanted in there. Two of the other three are the same one: The Irish Mafia. The more recent of the two having the heart warming tag line “we will pop u in the ass”. But there was another one: Irish blood with 9 whole members! Well, let’s check ‘em out.





Pretty much of a let down, I’m afraid. There are three posts in this group – two of them with the rather terse subject line “hey u” and the last with a very inviting “top of the morning, you stupid fuck”. Clearly the Myspace community needs a few grown ups.

Disgusted with Myspace, I finally fired up my Newsreader (I use MT_NewsWatcher on the Mac, but if you’re brave enough to dump Outlook Express (which is garbage in my snobby open-source opinion), Thunderbird, as well as offering a clearly superior email experience has News reading abilities built in. If you don’t want to change, or bother with a Newsreader, Google Groups will give you access to the Usenet archive, and you can join in the discussion if you have a Google account through a web-based interface instead. The oldest Celtic music newsgroup is rec.music.celtic. Let’s see what discussions are happening there. Ah… intelligent discussions without the flashy bullshit. I’ll stick to Usenet, thanks.

To be fair, Yahoo groups is another place I might want to check out if I was looking for an online community. They are a community group in the traditional sense (with the mailing list), but have added several social networking aspects as well (a profile, closed groups, etc.). I’m a member of many Yahoo groups, some for work, and some for music, some for history. Searching for ‘celtic music’ on Yahoo Groups returns:

<br /> 1 &#8211; 10 of 353 First | < Previous | Next > | Last<br />
The most popular seems to be The Celtic Muse with 3,614 members as of the date of this writing. The Celtic Muse is the forum for Marc Gunn’s real website, celticmp3s.com from which he offers a podcast that I have been subscribing to for some time.