Table of Contents

I Introduction to Online Studies and Usenet.- 1 Studying Social Information Spaces.- 2 “A Standing Wave in the Web of Our Communications”: Usenet and the Socio-Technical Construction of Cyberspace Values.- II Studying Spaces.- 3 Measures and Maps of Usenet.- 4 The Dynamics of Mass Interaction.- 5 Conversation Map: A Content-based Usenet Newsgroup Browser.- 6 Silent Participants: Getting to Know Lurkers Better.- III Enhancing Spaces.- 7 Computer Mediated Communication Among Teams: What are “Teams” and How are They “Virtual”?.- 8 Co Web — Experiences with Collaborative Web Spaces.- 9 From PHOAKS to TopicShop: Experiments in Social Data Mining.- 10 GroupLens for Usenet: Experiences in Applying Collaborative Filtering to a Social Information System.- 11 Exploring Interaction and Participation to Support Information Seeking in a Social Information Space.- Appendix: Studying Online Newsgroups.- A.1 Introduction.- A.2 Posting to Usenet.- A.3 Usenet Propagation.- A.4 The Birth and Death of Newsgroups.- A.5 How Messages Look.- A.6 How Usenet Is Accessed.- A.7 Invisible Layers of Usenet.- A.8 Dealing with Usenet Data.- A.9 Conclusion.

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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)