refusal computing - Everything's a newsgroup

A posting from earlier this year by Karl Fogel called Thread Theory explains how electronic conversation -- email, newsgroups, forums -- are all the same thing, threads.

This reminds me of something an old roommate had discovered 2 or 3 years ago when he was loving electronic fora -- Gmane, mailing lists, Usenet, blogs. He was also developing Web course software as a project for a software assignment for school. I think his quote was, "'You want a mailing list? That's a newsgroup. You want a Web forum? That's a newsgroup. You want a blog. Yeah, that's just a newsgroup.'" Needless to say, his group's Web course software design dropped the usual boring SQL database in favor of interacting with a Usenet server on the backend.