Steffanie, this is for you.

How did Usenet anticipate blogging?

Place. Usenet preceded the web in establishing a Weinbergerian sense of place, a commons. Blogs create places too.

Immediacy. Push that Send button and minutes later your message was flowing through servers around the world. It was like an email to the universe. Most blogging tools publish your post in seconds.

Finality. Once sent, you can't get your message back. True for blogs too, now that search engines, RSS aggregators, and history servers archive everything. This was good and bad. Good, when you valued permanence and survivability. Bad when you made a mistake.  

Syndication. Newsgroup servers share updates to feeds among each other. This is a peer-to-peer design that worked well for a long time, as long as you don't mind the bandwidth costs. Expect similar architectures in blogosphere clients and middleware by next year.

Spam. Usenet, like the Internet, was originally a non-commercial place. Academic and public service values dominated. So anything business was taboo. Blogs have been largely advertising-free, but the web is now highly commercial. Many blogs will run ads or receive corporate sponsorship.

Conversation. Unmoderated newsgroups are open to the world. Anyone can post a message, nobody can edit a message. So if I post, then you post, then I post, we have a conversation going. Sometimes with hundreds of participants. Have you heard of flaming? Invented here. Flame bait? Flame wars? Invented here too. But flames and flamewars are extremes of social feedback. If you violated Usenet netiquette, someone would let you know, and you would adjust your behavior. Different groups had different norms and you checked before your first post to a group.
   Bloggers have conversations too. I post on my blog, you post on yours, and so on. Trackback helps follow these since they are in multiple places. Sometimes a post is followed in a comment thread. 

Affiliation. If you were a regular reader of a newsgroup, you could get to know the posters. If you started to post, they would get to know you. With familiarity, trust, and participation came a sense of belonging to the group and ownership in the commons.
   With blogs, you own your own space. But with newsreaders, blogrolls and referral logs, you feel like you know people, like you belong to a loose gathering of like-minded people. 

Focus. Usenet may have been one of the first places on the Internet organized by subject instead of physical location. You didn't post wildly off-topic unless you wanted to be flamed. Blogs have themes and "blognets" have aggregate themes. With a few exceptions, comments are kept on topic.
   Unlike Usenet, blogs aren't neatly ordered by topic and bloggers post whatever interests them. Thank goodness for Google, DayPop and Technorati and all the other tools we use to navigate to posts and posters that interest us.

Writing style. This was one of the first places where anybody's writing could be seen by many people. Some accumulated wisdom on writing for the Net vs. for print. Still excellent advice for bloggers.  

Steffanie, have I answered your question?

Dave Winer's Tips for Candidates re Weblogs is handy. But it's just advice on gaming/joining the blogosphere. It will become standard political tradecraft, but it falls short of changing the world.

Dave, change the world again.

Support the The Bloggers Platform for California.

The platform's points should lead to hightened participatory democracy between elections:

1. A weblog for every elected official before the 2004 election.
2. A weblog for every student and teacher by 2005. 
3. A weblog for every Californian by 2006.
4. Censor-free Internet access in every public library.
5. Enterprise blognets for state and local government.

For the United States, we must aspire to no less.

[a klog apart]

Film Industry. My local TypePad, MetaFilter, and Edwards in 2004 meetups were cancelled; too few signups.

This is about mediablog literacy. I'm not a videographer. But I have a cheap webcam, video production software, digital cameras, a collection of microphones and other stuff attachable to my computer. However, a pen in my pocket doesn't mean I'm Shakespeare. So I'm off to start hanging with those grok these narrative storytelling forms.

p.s. Smokey and the Bandit-worthy traffic accident on the Bay Bridge. Car carrier (one of those double deck trucks dealers use to move 8-10 cars) slams in bridge supports, carrier's cab teeters over side of bridge, car falls off carrier with a complete flip, everyone else swerves to avoid it, forces another carrier into the barriers on the on the other side of the road. All lanes blocked at first, bridge and access roads back up for 2-2.5 hours and turns them into a 4 mph parking lot 9-11 miles long. Cars and drivers running out of gas and overheating.

It took two hours to make the 12 minute drive. The ride back was uneventful.