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People discussing thousands of topics
Network news is a wealth of information divided into subject categories called newsgroups. The information, or "articles", that make up the "news" are written by people interested in the topic. The writers post their articles to the newsgroup so that others can read them, reply, and comment. In that sense, a newsgroup is like a cork bulletin board where you write on a note card and pushpin it next to the card you're responding to.
Some newsgroups are devoted to current events and headlines. However, network news usually describes topical discussion groups, not "the news" in the traditional sense.
For example, popular newsgroups cover archaeology and sports teams, zoo animals' rights and physical handicaps. In that sense, the give and take and multiple voices of newsgroups make them more like the local coffee house or pub than the daily printed newspaper.
Newsgroup categories are organized in a structured, logical hierarchy. The hierarchy moves from general to specific.
Each newsgroup category can be compared to an organizational chart. For example, in the science (sci) category, there are many subtopics (some of which are shown below), which in turn may have subtopics to the third or fourth level. Thus, rec.sports.football.professional.buffalobills. Google Groups Help is a good place to start. If you use AOL, pull down the Internet menu and select Newsgroups.
If you can't find one that interests you, how about starting your own?
Most newsgroups exist on a network called USENET. It uses the same transmission path as the rest of the Internet, but it is a network in and of itself because it uses a protocol called Network News Transfer Protocol. NNTP is a set of rules that enables newsgroup articles to move smoothly through the Internet. Along with HTTP and several other TCP/IP protocols, NNTP is one component of the whole Internet "network of networks".
The Ground Zero Bisto, our course discussion forum, acts much like a newsgroup. The big difference? It's not fed into the USENET system.
The best quick intro is Google Groups' Basics of Usenet, Usenet Glossary, and Usenet Timeline.
Network news works on the client/server principle. A client program on your computer lets it interact with a server program on a remote computer. On your end, you need a client program called a newsreader to read and reply to articles or to post new articles. On the remote end, a news server is a computer dedicated to storing newsgroup articles. Because there are thousands of newsgroups, not all newsgroup categories are available on all news servers.
Because you go to the server and bring only the articles you want back to your client, newsgroups are examples of pull technology. Mailing lists, on the other hand, come to you, an example of a push technology. TALK, our course discussion forum, is more like a client-server newsgroup because you have to go to it.
The newsreader's interface that lets you select an article title from a list and to open it. Using commands or menus, you can then save the article, print it, post a new article, or reply to the first one openly to the group or privately to the person who wrote it. A series of articles and the responses to them are called threads.
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Did you know? Within four hours after you post, your message (and your posting history on every newsgroup) will be publicly accessible at Deja News. The folks there copy your posting from the news servers and make it available on web servers. Advantages: You can search all the newsgroups. You can read with your browser, so you don't need a news reader. They filter out the spam. |
Advice ...
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Warning Newsgroups are unmoderated. Anyone can post anything. And they do. Unfortunately, spam for
has so deluged some newsgroups that they don't discuss what their name implies. They don't discuss anything. They're the equivalent of empty lots full of litter and debris. Check out mailing lists |
Frequently asked questions. For starters, how do you pronounce FAQ?
ef-a-que? Try using that in a sentence. Try making it plural. Okay, that one's no good.
fax? Immediate confusion with the machine for transmitting documents.
fak? Most people use this one: Look for the fak. But is the plural the same, as in deer: one deer, two deer; one fak, two fak? Two faxes? What about spelling the plural? How would you use the thing as an adjective?
Meanwhile, FAQes (?) are all over the Web. If you use a search engine, you aren't going to find most of them. However, the USENET newsgroups were the place to be in the ten years between the mid-80's, when the Internet's protocols started getting standardized, and the mid-90's, when the Web brought pictures to the Internet and threaded discussions started popping up on every site from A to Z (including this course web). Learn more.
As the newsgroups grew in popularity, newcomers would end up asking the same questions over and over. So the old-timers started making lists of frequently asked questions and posting them frequently to the newsgroup. Newcomers were encouraged to "read the FAQ" before asking a question.
Many of these FAQ are regularly maintained and updated in text form even though many have migrated to Web sites. However, the ones still in text form can make great summaries of the common knowledge about many topics. The best hubs I know are a site about FAQes and MIT's repository, sorted by Usenet group. You can also read the newsgroup news.answers, where most FAQes are periodically posted.
I find the FAQes as a whole to be strongest on topics related to computers, to hobbies such as dog breeding, and to well-established academic disciplines such as linguistics.
The accumulated texts of all the newsgroup postings is huge. But they're all in one place and you can search them quickly at Google's Groups, which bought them from Deja.com. These searches are especially good for turning up experts who may well respond to a polite email enquiry. The information isn't always reliable, but it's information that you may find nowhere else. You can always verify it elsewhere.
Yahoo's advanced search will also let you search the newsgroups, using its early name: Usenet.
Re: News from Australia's Think Systems
FACT: More than 300,000 articles are posted to
over 40,000 newsgroups every day.
Re: News is a newsreader with powerful searching capabilities. You can now
search the complete text of every article from all newsgroups from today back to
1995, quickly and efficiently. Finding relevant newsgroup articles is now as
easy as typing in your search terms and within seconds you get a list of the
articles that best match what you're looking for.
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