[Air-l] usenet historiography question

[elw at stderr.org]

Google as an entity is only roughly five years old.

The X-No-Archive (and similar) discussions you're referencing are from the 
early 1990s.

Dejanews, even, post-dates the most vehement of those discussions.

--elijah


On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, Christopher Lueg wrote:

> Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:42:44 +1100 (EST)
> From: Christopher Lueg <christopher.lueg at utas.edu.au>
> Reply-To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> To: "air-l at listserv.aoir.org" <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
> Subject: Re: [Air-l] usenet historiography question
> 
> On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Jonathan Sterne wrote:
>
>> I'm trying to trace the development of a FAQ on MPEG that circulated on
>> usenet starting in 1994.  I've done a search on google groups but I'm
>> wondering if there is a more powerful or definitive tool.  Google seems
>> pretty hit or miss as I can find some stuff from that period, but there are
>> other things from 1994 that I know were there then that I can't find now.
>
> to some extent it's a characteristic of Usenet being a distributed but
> loosely coupled system. smaller hierarchies were (are) not necessarily
> propagated so widely such that google, netscan etc got their hands on the
> postings. others used technical measures to (try to) prevent their
> postings from reaching google. and there are cancel and supersedes control
> messages that (should) influence what was propagated/kept.
>
> there was also the big discussion re "X-No-Archive" headers initiated by
> people who were not happy that google turned what was perceived as
> 'transitory' communication into persistent communication.
>
> c.
>
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