From Usenet to CoWebs

This book provides an overview of interfaces to social information spaces, illustrated by several contemporary systems including Usenet News and CoWebs. Beginning with a general outline of those systems and a history of Usenet News, it looks at the problems of exploring virtual communities and distributed information systems, and of finding information in electronic environments. It outlines the successes and failures of traditional approaches like information filtering, collaborative filtering and information retrieval, and assesses new approaches such as visualisations of social processes and social navigation.
Among the key questions covered are:
- What aspects of an online group are important to its participants?
- How can the specific characteristics of a social information space be used to improve the design of the interface?
From Usenet to CoWebs will be essential reading for practitioners working on information spaces, conferencing systems, virtual communities and innovative interfaces to information spaces. It will also provide useful background reading for anyone studying or researching in these areas.

From the reviews:
"Lueg and Fisher have put together a strong collection of papers, some new, some previously published, about Usenet and related technologies. The strength of this book is its multiple perspectives on Usenet newsgroups, covering topics such as its political history, analyses of its social structure, and methods for extracting information from it."
This review is by MIT's Judith Donath and can be found in New Media & Society, Volume 6, Issue 3, June 2004.
"Lueg and Fisher have put together a strong collection of papers ... about Usenet and related technologies. The strength of this book is its multiple perspectives on Usenet newsgroups, covering topics such as its political history, analyses of its social structure, and methods for extracting information from it. ... is most successful as a techno-social volume about Usenet and similar discussion lists. ... This volume ... will be of special interest to interface designers and researchers studying online social behaviour." (Judith Donath, New Media & Society, Vol. 6 (3), 2004)
"The book is really about something much more engaging that the title implies, and academics, researchers and teachers ... will find much of what is written here of value. ... It is about social spaces and social interactions on the Internet. ... this book is a valuable read and I'd recommend it to anyone with a practical or research driven interest in the design, development and implementation of online spaces for social interactions." (Martyn Wild, Educational Technology and Society, Vol. 6 (4), 2003)