What is Netscan?
Netscan is a social accounting reporting service for the Usenet. Netscan provides reports on the activity of newsgroups and the histories of authors in those newsgroups. The Microsoft Community Research Group created Netscan as a service to the research community and a test-bed for enhanced community services. Research Sociologist Marc Smith leads a small group of developers creating next generation community interfaces.

How can I use Netscan?
Netscan is publicly available at http://netscan.research.microsoft.com.

New Data
Keeping up with Usenet is a big challenge. Growing rapidly, the Usenet feed is larger than 60GB a day. Netscan now provides data for all the newsgroups we get in our feed from January 1, 2000 through the end of August, 2001. Coming soon is data for September 2001. Look for quicker data updates coming in the near future.

Get an overview of the entire Usenet in one glance! Tree Maps are an interesting way to visualize large hierarchical structures -- like Usenet! Our Tree Map service allows you to zoom into just the neighborhood of newsgroups you are interested in and generate maps for any month in the data set.   Try it here.

Edited by: Marc Smith and Peter Kollock
Communities in Cyberspaceis devoted to exploring new forms of social organization and the changing concepts of community as social groups develop within computer networks. Contributors examine changes in the nature of personal identity, social organization and the connections between real-world communities and their extensions in cyberspace. Communities in Cyberspace is published by Routledge and is now available In association with Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com and other booksellers.