As I recalled the Green Card Lottery incident the other day, it also made me recall the sense of community we once had on USENET. Nothing like it seems to exist anymore on the internet. While we had all kinds of people online 'back in the day', they were primarily educated. The net connected the universities and a handful of tech businesses. It wasn't available to the general public and all the riff-raff which that entails.

When somebody breached the rules of netiquette (net ettiquette), they were quickly put in their place by professional flamers - people who could cause you severe emotional distress using only words in email. I was one of them. I prided myself on being able to bring a person literally to tears in 25 words or less. I no longer practice that craft. The point is that it was a community, and  there were acceptable rules of behaviour. If you violated the rules, you were scolded - and if your behaviour didn't improve you were excluded from the community. We had 'kill files'. If your name was in there, you no longer existed as far as the community was concerned. Forever. There is no way out of a kill file unless you change your name. (This turned out to be the fatal loophole.)

This social structure didn't scale to millions and perhaps billions of people. There are still a few private online groups that exist and have meaningful discourse, but the majority of the public forums have been crushed under the weight of the net masses. With thousands or hundreds of thousands of people shouting their messages and pitching their wares on any given forum, those few that might connect - cannot. They can't find each other. In electronics we called this the signal-to-noise ratio. There's information (signal) and static (noise). They both share the communication line. If the level of static reaches a certain point, you can no longer extract the information. It all becomes noise.

So there are two things I've identified which have affected the net 'community'. One is pervasive access. Too many people. The genie is out of the bottle. Can't change that. The second is this issue of identity. We fought long and hard to allow net access to be anonymous, but you can't keep bad guys and anti-social behaviour away unless you can somehow prevent them from reincarnating on a different service with a different name. A foolproof identity. Who are your online friends these days? People you know. Your real friends and family and co-workers. You don't have any idea who anybody else is - and there are so many bad guys that you can't trust them. This is what is different between today's internet and the one I grew up with. This problem will never be solved in the U.S. We are way too obsessed with privacy. But there's still hope. This problem will likely be solved in China. And if it proves to offer a benefit to the rest of the world - it will find its way here.

There's one final piece of the puzzle. That is the aspect of 'scolding' or even more importantly a system of laws or acceptable behaviour conventions with consequences for violations. An ISP can disallow access for certain behaviour, but for the most part - there are still no laws. The only things which are blatantly illegal online are breaking and entering and child molestation. Everything else is by definition legal. This problem will also be solved by the Chinese.

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The new Yellow Pages just arrived. I flipped to the music section. Advertising rates went up dramatically this year. I kept the same size ad anyway. If others are going to cut back, I'll get more prominent display.

Only one other store besides myself kept the large-format ad. Unfortunately, it is my nearest competitor. Everybody else shrunk their ads. There are three new music store listings. I know about all of them, but still - it is three new listings to compete with. But wait... Something is missing. This is quite interesting. The nearby rock-n-roll superstore (the one named after a famous counter-culture crossroads) isn't listed. They don't have a big ad. They don't have a small ad. They don't even have the free text listing. They aren't there. The store is, and it is open. But they didn't sign an advertising contract for this year with the phone company. This can only mean one thing. Sometime over the course of the coming year something is going to happen which will result in them not needing to be found in the phone book. Read between the lines. I really need to go over and have a talk with them.

There aren't a lot of other possibilities. For a brick-and-mortar business, more than 75% of new business comes from the Yellow Pages. Even google can't bring in a fraction of the referrals that come from the phone book.  For an internet business it would be different, but this business isn't an established internet retailer. You can shrink the phone book ad or even revert to a basic text listing - but to remove it entirely is the equivalent of business suicide.