Activity on this forum

[charles.leviton]

i was curious to know if the regulars on this forum had an explanation
for the dramatic drop-off in activity on this forum since about Jul/
2002.

I just happened to click on the "About this group" link and noticed
that in 2000-01-02 this group averaged well over a 1000 messages a
month but after 7/02 it never crossed 1000 and in the last 4 years or
so, rarely reached even 600. Has the technology changed so much-
fragmented or whatever?

 

[Joseph Kesselman]

i was curious to know if the regulars on this forum had an explanation
for the dramatic drop-off in activity on this forum since about Jul/
2002.

The technology's better understood, and better documented, since then.
There's also been fragmentation into more separate discussions
(webchats, private servers, etc), so everyone who has a question isn't
coming to this one Usenet discussion in search of an answer.

Nature of the beast. We're past the peak of the hype curve (when people
were claiming that "XML is Intelligent Data" and nonsense like that) and
into the range where it's just ordinarily interesting because it really
is useful.

 

[charles.leviton]

The technology's better understood, and better documented, since then.
There's also been fragmentation into more separate discussions
(webchats, private servers, etc), so everyone who has a question isn't
coming to this one Usenet discussion in search of an answer.

Nature of the beast. We're past the peak of the hype curve (when people
were claiming that "XML is Intelligent Data" and nonsense like that) and
into the range where it's just ordinarily interesting because it really
is useful.

That makes sense.

Google groups has always been my first stop but come to think of it
many technologies/subjects have their own dedicated bulletin boards
thanks to the profusion of PHP-BB's!

Moi, I have been a mainframe developer for 10+ years now and trying to
add some skills- XML seemed to be logical step forward from RDBMS
especially with IBM's DB2 product now announcing native XML support
and hence my visit to this forum

Any pointers?

Regards

 

[Johannes Koch]

There's also been fragmentation into more separate discussions
(webchats, private servers, etc), so everyone who has a question isn't
coming to this one Usenet discussion in search of an answer.

[...]

Google groups has always been my first stop

This _is_ not Google groups. This _is_ Usenet. However you seem to use
Google's web interface to Usenet.

 

[charles.leviton]

There's also been fragmentation into more separate discussions
(webchats, private servers, etc), so everyone who has a question isn't
coming to this one Usenet discussion in search of an answer.

[...]

Google groups has always been my first stop

This _is_ not Google groups. This _is_ Usenet. However you seem to use
Google's web interface to Usenet.

Valid point! I have been participating in usenet discussions for the
last 10 years almost exclusively via the web (first thru DejaNews and
then thru Google groups).
Since Google Groups has both usenet and non-usenet discussion groups,
I often don't know which one I am on (even if it says clearly at the
top of the google groups page!)

I remember getting into trouble one time because of using the terms
"forum" and "newsgroup" interchangeably.