The past remembered

james_nicoll pointed to someone else asking people to go to Google.groups and search for their earliest usenet posting.

Mine, so far as Google can find, is in 1998.

But in the searching I got to look at some of the history caught in the web. For those (and I don't know how many that is) who came to the net later, the world before blogging was rich. I started online sometime in, '89, or so, with BBSs. It's where I got to know skeetermonkey.

Many of those conversations were ephemeral. I did well on BBSs (even though my typing was worse than it is now, and my statements no less dense) because the form of them; simultaneous conversations, were much as the forms of my real life interactions with people (three conversations in a crowded newsroom, while one was working on a layout, or pasting-up a dummy: converstation across four tables at two in the morning on Sunday of a convention; where the waitress had just made everyone stand up because the table hadn't been bussed in six hours, and there were the remains of several dinners belonging to people who had paid and left, etc.. Maia is still, after eight years, amazed that I can keep track of what was being talked about when her family goes off the rails and starts to talk about something else, but I digress).

But usenet wasn't parallel, it was serial. One posted something, and it was complete.

Today I read a lot of old usenet. Some of it was good (there was a rant on UMA where I ripped into a moron who was saying any "leg" who had the gall to obey AR 670-1 better be larger, or lower ranking than he, or said asshat would beat the shit out of him).

Those were good times, in a way different from the good times of today.

It's where I "met" soldiergrrrl, and gridlore and pnh and tnh and a whole lot of people I know now, and didn't realise I knew then (like kate_schaeffer).

Hell, the present Open Thread (91) on Making Light has a theme, which was presaged on a rassff thread, back in 1999.

The wheel goes round and round. While one can't step twice in the same river, the from the banks it looks much the same, and that's a comfortable thing.

Trust them as much as you like

6A announced, back in January, that they meant to implement some analytics.

They claim it's benign, me; given the recent flaps, I don't really care to have people poking about in my affairs.

This is the announcement in Lj Biz.

With this new change, we'll now also use Omniture on a very small random sampling (about 5%) of journals and communities, including profile pages, friends pages and comment pages. This change will take place on or after September 27, 2007.

Omniture is a website analytics service. The system will collect information that's pretty straightforward, including what browser you're using, what site scheme you use, your window size, how people travel through the site (what are the common links, where are people going after viewing their friends page, what people are or aren't clicking on), and things like how many page views different parts of the site get.

With this change we will be able to learn more about how you use the site and what areas are confusing or are in need of improvement. We'll also have a good way to help prioritize all of your suggestions based on what people actually use.

Some key points:

* We're only going to apply the cookie to a very small random sampling of users, about 5%.
* We're using the resulting stats to find out what to focus on in the future for LJ.
* The Omniture code doesn’t capture any private data such as payment information provided in the Gift Shop.
* Omniture does not have access to friends-only or private entries.
* You can opt out, and if you've already opted out, you'll stay that way.

As always, we are providing a way for any user to opt out of contributing to the stats-gathering (even though we know it runs the risk of statistically biasing our results). If you’d like to opt out, go to the Admin Console and type "set opt_exclude_stats 1". This opt out applies to the entire implementation of Omniture -- site-schemed pages and the new inclusion of journals, profiles and communities. If you've already opted out, you don't need to do so again.

We're looking forward to having more detailed data to help us make decisions about the best ways to improve the site!

If you aren't all that happy with the idea of Ominiture poking about when you are using other sites who happen to be clients of Omniture, go to this page and set the opt-out cookie.

For Firefox I had to manually set the cookie in my options (I've had some other places where cookies wouldn't set either).

That might seem belt and braces, but there you go.