untangling_the_web

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Special Topics-News, Blogs, &
Technology Search
Newsgroups, Forums, & Mailing lists
News is one of the types of information most amenable to the Internet: both are fast
moving, worldwide, and in high demand. Along with the proliferation of news sources
on the Internet have come an even greater number of ways to share opinions on
every subject, limited only by the scope of the human imagination. In this article, I
am going to discuss several different ways of accessing both news and opinions on
the Internet: newsgroups, message boards or forums, and mailing lists. I discuss
weblogs in the next section because they require special software and thus demand
a separate discussion.
Newsgroups in general and Usenet
in particular have lost a great deal of
their prominence in recent years as
more outlets for sharing information
and communicating on the Internet
have appeared. Usenet is a system
that allows individuals to post
messages and have them read
around the world within about three
hours. One of the drawbacks of
Usenet is that it requires special
software (a newsreader) configured
to send and receive data via a user's
Internet Service Provider's news
server. Microsoft embeds its
newsreader into software such as
Outlook and Outlook Express.
Usenet Warning
This is a place on the
Internet I recommend
exercising great caution
and skepticism because
anyone with lnternet
access can literally post
anything to a newsgroup,
and often do.
Usenet newsgroups are noted for being chaotic, notoriously unreliable (lots of
gossip), and confusing. So why would anyone look at them? Because occasionally
there is valuable and unique information posted to newsgroups.
By August 2000, there was 'only one Usenet search engine remaining: Deja
(formerly Dejanews). Fortunately, Google acquired Deja in 2001 and made available
the entire Deja archive consisting of over 700 million posts from 1981 to today.
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