Okay, I'll bite. I do not think that the technology of the WWW is going to
replace Usenet anytime soon. The W3 will continue to grow and become more
interesting and useful, but it is a different creature from NetNews/Usenet.
There is a *neatness* to the pizzaz and color of the Web, but "hypertext"
is still not an interactive medium. Do not forget that one of the great
strengths of Usenet is the iinteraction between the readers and posters.
The conversations are not "real-time" but have an immediacy all their
own.
The WWW is not going to replace Usenet, but it will affect its growth and
evolution.
Thus, JIK and the RTFM site remain useful as archives of the NetNews
medium, and access to archives is a prime use for hypertext, so the site
will probably move to WWW as its main interface (Note: WWW client
software may well have integral/seamless access to netnews, but it will
not mean that WWW has obliterated or obsoleted netnews.)
Tale, as the voluntarily acknowledged "Czar" of newsgroups, will maintain
some importance as the arbiter of the development of the namespace that
netnews uses, and that the W3 will have to operate against for its
indexing functions.
This, of course, points out that there are still going to be
conversations and interaction between the people who form the most
important part of the netnews/Usenet amalgam. You might want to engage
in a semantic argument about whether a *seamless* interface changes
netnews into WWW, but it will only be a semantic quibble.
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