My Web archive of the Usenet FAQs won an award from O'Reilly and Associates
for "The Best of the Net" which I think was in general the best of the
web. The award included no monetary gains for me, but it did include a
nice framed certificate. The certificate doesn't have my name on it,
which I suppose is in the spirit of the collaborative effort that created
the resource.
I wasn't able to attend the awards ceremony. I sent the following
"acceptance speech" to my representative in the Bay area (J Greely),
although I don't think he had an opportunity to read it:
I thank you for this award, but can't help but think that it is somewhat
undeserved, considering my slight contribution to the whole thing.
The Hypertext Usenet FAQs would not be possible if I wasn't standing
on the shoulders of many thousands of dedicated individuals,
so I feel I should take a moment to acknowledge their achievements.
Rather than listing them all by name, I'll try to summarize just a
bit.
First, this project would have been impossible without the World Wide
Web, in my opinion the most significant dimension added to the Internet
since Usenet News. The Web originated at the European Laboratory for
Particle Physics, and was develloped in a worldwide effort by people
like Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly, and a cast of thousands.
Second, credit must go to Jonathon Kamens and his cohorts at MIT,
for providing a central repository and a moderated newsgroup to collect
all the varying FAQs. More than any others, I am standing on the
shoulders of these people.
The people who have done the most work, and who deserve the most credit
are the FAQ maintainers themselves. This large, diverse group of
people does the bulk of the work by writing and editing the enormous
amount of documentation that you'll find in the Usenet FAQs
And finally, almost all of the FAQ maintainers rely on perhaps hundreds
of their fellow experts on the Net to contribute to their FAQs by
providing corrections, new information, and alternative viewpoints.
Clearly, the FAQs are the work of the entire Net, more than any single
individual.
Thank you.
There are also a few other things of interest, including responses to
a couple of the sillier threads from the mailing list, below. But this
was the main point of this piece of mail, so I'll sign off here.
tom
P.S.
Additions to the web archive.
Some of you may have noticed some recent improvements in my Web archive
of the FAQs, I hope they are found to be useful. In particular, I've
added a listing by newsgroup, a very limited search facility (not full
text, just title, keywords, and archive name), and just today, the list
of links to each letter of the alphabet that several people have requested.
Re: pronunciation
I say "eff ay cyu". I'm getting used to hearing "fack", but it annoys me;
I'm not sure why. By the way someone said they used "fack" on Usenet,
and F-A-Q in real life. Interesting trick, pronouncing words in an
ascii format. :-) In a related story, when I first touched Unix, I
learned the one true editor, which I pronounced "vie". Then I came to
OSU, and was taught to say "vee eye", which I've found to be much more
common. So if vi is spelled, why should faq be pronounced? It occurs
to me that I could force the issue by always using "F.A.Q." in text.
But I'm not that selfish. (It's just too annoying to type :-)
Re: Most irrelevant query
I get these queries all the time. Some people seem to think I know
everything there is to know about Usenet. Others seem to think I wrote
every single F.A.Q. I try to redirect F.A.Q.-specific queries to the
author of the F.A.Q. in question. But I've gotten the most off the
wall questions. Several users want me to teach them how to post to
Usenet. And lot's of "where do I find information on foo?" questions.
I have reduced the occurrence of my name in the web archive to a single
place, which has greatly reduced the mail, but not eliminated it.
Stats:
We get about 10-12 thousand requests a day on weekdays (about half on
weekends) lately for the F.A.Q.s. There is a page full of stats (always
for "yesterday" when the software works correctly) under the technical
notes link. Alt-sex is extremely popular (big surprise), but it is
surprising that the SGI stuff occasionally even rivals the alt-sex
accesses.
Maintenance.
I am falling a little behind at the moment on various requests for
fixes, additions, and deletions for the archive. Please bear with
me. Thanks.
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