Power Usenet

Old news does occasionally make headlines, at least with our friend's from Digg anyways.

Sci.astro newsgroup poster "Tom" made it to the front page of Digg today with his 1999 post about why space is dark.

Why did it take 8 years for this random post to gain notoriety?


Perhaps the world's supply of Ubuntu and "top ten ways to do x" articles has been exhausted. Either way sci.astro is enjoying a bit of time in the sun.

Among the posts in the newsgroup's original thread, were comments from planetarium program directors, university professors, and members of amateur astronomy organizations. Digg posters commented on the science behind the post, as well as made jokes about why space is dark, giving reasons such as "It's emo."

Sci.astro is home to a diverse group of astronomy enthusiasts and threads can be very in depth and technical. We definitely recommend checking out more recent threads in the newsgroup and perhaps posting a bit of your own.

Of course, as for whether or not your post will make the front page of a social media news site 8 years in the future is anyone's guess.

See the Digg link post at http://www.digg.com/space/Why_Is_Space_Dark

In honor of the 10th anniversary of online auction giant eBay, PowerUsenet is featuring misc.forsale.non-computer, the home to eBay's (then AuctionWeb) first announcement.

Pierre Omidyar created the code that would become eBay in the late summer of 1995, posting it to his consulting business' website Echo Bay Technology Group (ebay.com). A few days later, after experiencing very little initial traffic, Omidyar posted an announcement to misc.forsale.non-computer listing some items on auction, such as "Autographed Marky Mark Underwear" going for $400 and a "1952 Silver Dawn Rolls Royce" with a (then) current bid of $38,500.

Needless to say, the project took off and by AuctionWeb's first anniversary, Omidyar was earning enough in commissions from his site to quit his day job and dedicate all his energies to ebay.com. A little over a year later AuctionWeb officially became eBay and a year after that the company went public.

Pierre Omidyar is now a billionaire, ebay.com is visited by millions of people every day, and misc.forsale.non-computer is another humble newsgroup which helped launch a great idea.