does the site ever seem segregated?

Depends on how you make use of the site navigation. If you scan the New Posts list you get more of an overview of what's going on and who's doing the talking about what subjects at that moment in time. If you use the tag grid to go directly to a topic and find the new topics under one tagged subject matter you miss all the other stuff happening outside that cluster unless you browse through several other clusters to see what's new there.

That's what is nice about the site. It works for mostly everyone, their specific interests and the time they have to devote to socializing.

Hey there OG

Haven't seen you in a while! That's a bit happy. Hope all is good with you....


off now to check out the new look here...

im doin aite

you working hun? how's the pooch? good to see your face round here!

yess at an art store as a cashier, my dog is fine her scars are healed

i miss the livin hell out of her..

Ah....read that.... Michaels right! Love those stores. Keep up your art work OG.... hey, try and post some if you can - you're doing sketches right now, yeah. Would love to see some if you felt you could show them.

Glad to hear she healed well - awwwwwww.... know how tough that is for you.

(so glad you are working - chin up mate.... doing well!)

I find that I post in certain categories, and not in others. You will usually find me in aging, relationships, religion, medical issues, computers, consumer electronics, and sometimes, when I am feeling really testy, politics. There are some others that I visit once in awhile, when the subject strikes me.

Rarely will I post to other categories. Either I don't have much to say, or am not interested in the subjects, or don't know about them enough to think my input is worthwhile. For instance, I would probably seldom be on a history or an original writing thread. For awhile, I was on some of the word game threads, but tired of them.

I would suspect that most long time A2Kayers have their favorite places in the site.....................maybe out of habit. I would suspect that people who congregate in areas that I don't, have no idea who I am, and vice versa.

A2K is a community. If you think about any real life community, there are people who use certain stores, belong to clubs in the area, and go to various churches. In your neighborhood, I would suspect that there are some people that you run into on a regular basis, and others that you seldom see. I think that it is the same concept on A2k!

urrybody knows me

haha true.. communites do have mini communities in them..
i usually click 'new posts'. yay 4 me

being in rap battle threads, i noticed the main posters there never post anywhere else usually..

where is the curiosity?

OGIONIK- I would expect that a rap thread would attract a group of younger posters. Most of the "main posters", as you put it, have been here for quite a long time, and tend to be older.

A2K has been around since 2002. Before that there was a site called "Abuzz" which was run by the New York Times. I had been on that site since around 1999. When the Times decided to close down Abuzz, Robert (to my everlasting gratitude) decided to start a site of his own, and A2K was born. Many of the people from Abuzz migrated to A2K!

Speaking of Abuzz, for those who are interested in its history, I found an article, written in 2000, that some of you may find interesting:

http://www.clickz.com/421111

Ahhh ...Abuzz. Thanx for posting that bit of nostalgia, Phoenix.

Definitely! I abhore confrontation and will avoid politics and religion like the plague.

In my opinion, there's too much serious stuff that goes on in this site. I prefer threads that have some fun to them, so you can have a laugh and smile. There's enough serious stuff in day to day life.

What happened to Abuzz? I was advised of it by some folks but apparently it had just closed. You could get to the website still, but it already had a "condemned" (or some such) sign up.

So Google next brought me to A2K. I have branched out from here, but this was my first excursion into this kind of communication.

But if the same folks who inhabited Abuzz were the ones who formed the foundation here, why did this succeed and that didn't?

The closest I get to rap music is when idling at a stop light next to one of those vehicles that goes ka-THUMP, ka-THUMP and rattles my fillings.

I do like some of the hip hop stuff though and the "So You Think You Can Dance" show that I like does have guest rappers on some times.

i cant wait to get a car..

a buick regal notch back,

forget the other names..


puts two 15's in the trunk, upgrade the tweeters and mids.

woop woop!! ima be vibrating peoples rear view mirros off.

Well, our group is more nimble with development, we don't have shareholders to answer to (yes, we have users, but we don't have anyone with an actual stake in the site, other than Robert) and we play to the group's strengths rather than mourning their weaknesses. The NY Times wanted Abuzz to be pure Q/A and then, when it wasn't, they stopped supporting it.

I think Robert's willingness to have an expensive hobby is another big part of it. The New York Times approached Abuzz as a business -- they wanted to monetize it. That proved hard to do, especially when "partners" like Pampers had single accounts create all kinds of bogus questions, which Abuzz regulars quickly figured out.

As their attempts at monetizing Abuzz failed, the NYT decided they couldn't afford an expensive hobby, and bye-bye Abuzz. (Of course with paid staff et al Abuzz was likely much more expensive yet than A2K.)

I'm amazed he can afford to do it, but I'm grateful that he does. He and his crew have done a good job on this latest update.

One thing worth mentioning is that Abuzz failed right in the middle of the dot com bust. They did a lot wrong and very little right, so there's a number of reasons to point to, but the main reason was: overvaluation.

I could have made abuzz profitable in one day, but nobody could make abuzz profitable to the tune they had been banking on. The NY Times was spending big bucks on abuzz hoping for a big payoff. They could have survived as a marginally profitable site very easily but that wasn't what they had been budgeting for. When the dot com bubble burst, they had to stop bleeding money on pipe dreams and went for cutting losses instead of turning it into an ad-supported profitable niche site.

They had the wrong business model (selling the software as a service to companies and product placement within the community), executed it poorly (other people do the "expert as an advertisement" better than they ever did), and their software was very very poorly made.

You could use anyone's username, you didn't need to confirm your account in any way (e.g. no need for the email to be real), they didn't filter sockpuppetry (e.g. you could vote as many times as you could make a fake account) and did all that while trying to rely on the user input that they never fully sanitized.

It was really horrendously bloated code, with no security. Hell I could make people say things in their own account just by sending them a specially crafted email. I did it to bobsal once when he insisted it was not possible. I sent him an email with an iframe of a page that launched a bunch of popups to specially crafted abuzz urls. The urls were there by design, so that you could reply from an html email with a reply form.

So when he got the email, it displayed in his preview screen in outlook and launched a bunch of popups, each posting something to a different thread.

It was a joke in terms of technology, but they could have made it a profitable site by putting ads on it. They tried selling the ads themselves instead of accepting a lower CPM with networks and never managed to sell their inventory.

Making abuzz profitable could have been done overnight. They'd needed to have dropped 90% of their paid staff (keeping ones on to make the folksonomy actually work and code stability into the program) and signed up for third party ad networks to sell their inventory.

But that wouldn't have qualified as a success for them, so they cut their losses.