Paul Festa interviews Marc Smith, resident sociologist at Microsoft Research. "Microsoft's in-house sociologist." It's a good interview of insights in the use of Usenet Newsgroups to analyze social networks and hopfully improve information retrieval(search). Lots of the typical questions regarding spam, and value of short lists to answer questions, however the reason why this was worth blogging, was the fact that there really is a trend converging on the use of IR & social networks to not only help people find information, but also to help people find each other. Yes this is almost like knowledge management, but it definitely is about community. We aren't limited to our physical community, and tools such as Verity K2 or this new MS Aura project I can see a stronger pull towards better IR tools. All the better for us who are trying to find answers to questions.