The mild frontier

by Michelle Chihara

SITE SEEING

well.com hell.com bittersweets.org

Consider it the beginning of the end for the Internet's Wild West.

When Web site Deja News unveiled a redesign last Mon-day, May 11, it quietly lopped the "news" off its name and replaced it with ".com." Like that name change, the site's redesign was subtle, predict-able, and trendy. It also has the potential to change the nature of one the more interesting parts of the Internet.

That's because Deja.com is the busiest gateway to Usenet, one of the oldest and wildest reaches of the Internet frontier. More than four million people use the site to access Usenet's 45,000-plus newsgroups -- highly specialized conversations about everything from Babylon 5 to baby clothes.

Totally user-regulated, Usenet is known for its spam and flame wars as well as for its serious exchanges; it represents many-to-many communication at its best, and also at its worst. "In its simplest form, Usenet represents democracy," wrote Columbia instructor Michael Hauben in his book Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (IEEE Computer Society).

And starting in 1995, Deja News made it all available to anyone with a Web browser. By making Usenet easier to access, the company built a Web site that draws six million page-views a day. Deja's redesign is an attempt to profit from all that traffic -- not necessarily an easy job. After all, messy democratic debates are, as new CEO Tom Phillips put it in the New York Times, "not killer" in terms of making money.

"Advertisers have a hard time with discussions and chats," says Debbie Newman, Deja.com's vice-president of marketing, "because the behavior itself is so engaging that people aren't interested in ads."

Deja.com's solution is simple: get more consumer-oriented. The redesigned site now focuses on "Deja ratings," a system of Web-based polls where users rate consumer goods and then talk about them. And it's that change that may have repercussions beyond the Web site.

It's hard to put a number on Usenet's population, but Deja's users clearly represent a healthy chunk of it. And the growing consumerism of that gateway may well begin working changes on Usenet itself. It might become more useful, but "useful" still threatens the libertarian spirit of Usenet. It's not hard to see this as another petit mort in the Net's ongoing union with commerce.