Amer Neely
HISTORY
People love to communicate. They can go on and on about the darndest things. In the academic community, it's crucial that researchers share their knowledge with others. Thus it's no wonder that this group of people should come up with a way of using computers to allow them to share information with others worldwide. Remember, this is the same group of people who gave us the Internet.
Before the term "Internet" became popular to describe the global network of networks we keep hearing about, there was Usenet. We're talking 1979 here! Duke University in North Carolina is the birthplace of Usenet, and Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott are recognized as the fathers. They developed a method of sharing information with other computer users using the Unix set of commands called UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol). Now, sophisticated software handles almost all of the distribution automagically.
SO WHAT IS IT IN ENGLISH?
Think of the publicly available bulletin board at your local laundromat. It has maybe a dozen postings covering such things as apartments for rent, guitars for sale, and notices about lost pets. It also has things like a notice from someone needing a ride to Denver this summer, or someone wanting to know more about Crohn's disease.
Now imagine all the bulletin boards in all the laundromats in the world, all the variety stores in the world, all the grocery stores in the world, and any other places where you would find a bulletin board. Put them all together and make one giant bulletin board out of it. Next, organize it into topics, putting all the messages together that pertain to a particular subject. You'd have one for jobs of course, but wait! We're talking global here - we have to make this a lot more specific. So, there would be a group of messages for jobs in Ontario, another group for jobs in Belgium, another one for jobs in the medical industry, etc. Do the same thing with the thousands of other topics.
What you have now is a model for what the Usenet is. It is a public collection of "postings" or email messages, organized by subject, and distributed around the world on the Internet. At last count there were over 30,000 separate newsgroups! And that's not the complete Usenet set. There are hundreds of thousands of newsgroups, but most of them don't get distributed globally.
ORGANIZATION OF NEWSGROUPS
This is one area of the Internet where there seems to be some sense of order and democracy. The organization of newsgroups is based on hierarchies. The main top level ones are:
Bear in mind that there are local hierarchies as well. For example, there are a number of newsgroups related to the University of Western Ontario. These groups start with uwo as their main heading. Groups about Ontario begin with ont. These groups don't usually get distributed globally, but some do.
Under the main headings, the newsgroups get broken down into other categories or levels. For example, the main news hierarchy contains dozens of subheadings, from news.admin.announce to news.sysadmin. These are pronounced "news dot admin dot announce" and "news dot sysadmin".
WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH NEWSGROUPS?
Have you ever wanted to be able to ask a question and have it reach as many people as possible? Using the appropriate Usenet newsgroup, you can do just that.
Let's say you want to know what the job market is like in another province, or a different country. Chances are there is already a newsgroup covering the province or country you are interested in. For our example, let's say you live in British Columbia, but are thinking of moving to Ontario. A quick search reveals the following newsgroups that may be of use to you:
bionet.jobs.wanted bit.listserv.biojobs biz.jobs biz.jobs.offered can.jobs misc.jobs.contract misc.jobs.fields.chemistry misc.jobs.misc misc.jobs.offered misc.jobs.offered.entry misc.jobs.resumes sci.med.occupational uw.ece.jobs
Other newsgroups: (may not be available at your Internet provider)
aol.neighborhood.ont.hamilton.jobs aol.neighborhood.ont.jobs aol.neighborhood.ont.london.jobs aol.neighborhood.ont.niagara-falls.jobs aol.neighborhood.ont.ottawa.jobs aol.neighborhood.ont.st-catherines.jobs aol.neighborhood.ont.toronto.jobs aol.neighborhood.ont.windsor.jobs ont.jobs
LOCAL VERSUS REMOTE
Your Internet account typically includes access to Usenet newsgroups. The number of groups available to you depends on a number of things. Your Internet provider may decide to host the news- groups locally. This means that they carry a number of groups and keep all the messages on their main server for a few weeks. As new messages come in, the oldest ones are purged.
Of course, carrying all the groups requires an incredible amount of disk space. Tens of thousands of groups each with various numbers of messages, sometimes numbering thousands, in each group! Very few Internet providers have the disk space needed to carry a full newsfeed locally. So, they may carry a small percentage of the most popular ones. LondonNet carries almost 3,000 groups locally.
The other way for an Internet provider to get a newsfeed is to make a connection from their server to another one which does carry a full newsfeed. This is called a remote feed. The connection might be by high-speed cable, fiber optic cable, or even satellite.
There are pros and cons with each method. With a local connection, the access speed is much faster, since the information is already on the local server. The downside is you don't have access to all the groups. There may be some that you would like to have, but they just aren't available with your provider. You might be able to convince the administrator/s to get the group/s you're interested in.
With the remote newsfeed, sometimes bringing in all the newsgroups takes a bit of time - remember you are accessing another computer somewhere on the Internet and making a request for a sizable chunk of information. Once you have a list of all the newsgroups, you then have to wait while all the messages in the group you're reading get transferred to your computer as well. The upside is that you have access to lots more information.
So, to recap, with local newsfeeds you trade off the number of groups you have access to against the speed of getting the ones that are carried. With remote newsfeeds, you trade off a bit of time against getting access to lots more newsgroups.
READING THE NEWSGROUPS
There are a couple of ways you can read the news. For many people, their first look at the Internet is through a web browser such as Netscape. Once configured according to your Internet provider's instructions, activating the "News" feature of your browser will call up the newsgroups available to you.
I prefer to get a dedicated news reader. These are simply programs that you get and run on your computer that are designed specifically to deal with reading news postings, replying to messages, posting new ones, etc. They generally have more fea- tures than a built-in reader in a web browser. Many readers are available on the Internet either as shareware or freeware.
For Windows 3.x and Windows 95 users, Free Agent is a favourite. NewsXpres is also popular. The software repository TUCOWS have a number of news readers available.
If you are an MS-DOS user, and your email program is Pine, you can use that to access the newsgroups. (Pine actually stands for Program for Internet News and Email). Just use the "L" feature from the main menu to access the list of folders. You may have to configure it to point to the news server used by your Internet provider.
WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT TO FIND?
This might be better answered by what you won't find. There are so many newsgroups that it's a very good bet the topic you are interested in already has an existing and active newsgroup. Almost every group has a regular posting called an FAQ (Frequent- ly Asked Questions). This is usually posted by the same individual on a fairly regular basis, say every two or three weeks. This document covers questions that new readers of the group would ask, and provides answers. The answers typically come from veteran participants of the group. The group news.answers is the place to look for FAQs on the other newsgroups. Before posting a question to a group, all new users (and some veterans) are encouraged to find and read the FAQ for that group.
What if you don't find a newsgroup that discusses your favourite topic? Well, you can start the process of creating your own! Yes, like the Internet at large, no one organization is in control of the Usenet. Creation, deletion, distribution, and monitoring of newsgroups is done by individuals in the Usenet community. That's democracy in action.
In the newsgroups news.groups and news.answers you will find documents posted regularly describing the process you must go through in order to create a new group.
A common use of the newsgroups is job hunting. There are a number of newsgroups dedicated to this, some by province, others by field or occupation. For example, can.jobs carries postings by employers. You will find job postings for jobs anywhere in Canada.
MODERATED VERSUS UNMODERATED
You will discover the definitions of these terms very quickly after delving into the newsgroups. A moderated group is one where an individual (or group of individuals) reads every submission before posting it to the group proper. This ensures that the newsgroup stays on topic, and that "flame wars" don't erupt. An example in the real world might be an academic journal with refereed articles, or a restaurant with a polite but discriminating doorman.
The overall intent of moderated newsgroups is to increase the "signal-to-noise" ratio of the group.
Unmoderated newsgroups are, as you might imagine, sometimes a free-for-all of messages. You will find off-topic postings, replies to the off-topic postings, and replies to these replies. Somewhere in there you might find an answer to a question you have.
This is not to say that all unmoderated newsgroups are not worth looking into. Just be prepared for a lower signal-to-noise ratio. Many of the alt.* groups are virtual reservoirs of information, but not all providers carry them.
TALK THE TALK
Participating in electronic communication is such a unique experience for people that it can't be compared to most other forms of communication. Letter-writing is the closest thing.
Consider talking with someone face-to-face. You have the benefit of aural clues (how loud they are speaking) to give you an idea as to their temperament and meaning. You also have numerous visual clues - whether they are smiling or smirking. You also know, visually, that they are a specific sex, perhaps of a certain cultural background, and roughly how old they are.
Even a telephone conversation offers enough "bandwidth" to allow most of us to communicate effectively with others.
And yet, consider all the times you've been "misunderstood", or you have not gotten the meaning of someone else's speech.
None of the clues mentioned above are available to you when you take part in electronic communication, which is precisely what newsgroups are all about. So, before firing off a hasty response to someone's opinion about your favourite and dear-to-heart topic, remember, that they're entitled to their opinion too. Many a flame war has been started by simply responding to a posting in the heat of the moment.
What's a flame war? An electronic war zone, where the theatre is the newsgroup, the ammunition is email, and the victims are usually innocent bystanders (other readers of the group).
Flame wars erupt when someone posts (sometimes intentionally) a message to a newsgroup that may be "politically incorrect", or just outright slams a particular culture, sex, individual, political group, or whatever. It might even be a mistake, or unintentional remark. This usually incites people to angrily respond, posting their opinion of the original poster to the newsgroup. Remember, we're talking world-wide coverage here. One spark might result in hundreds or thousands of responses. Before long, we have responses to responses, hundreds of messages in a newsgroup that have *nothing* to do with the topic, and a lot of angry readers. Newsgroups have withered and died as a result of flame wars.
As a general rule, don't take part in these. If you feel you must respond, do so directly to the individual who posted the offend- ing article, not to the newsgroup. But wait a day or so before responding, just to cool off.
Oh yes, the term flame war has led to another gem of Usenet terminology: asbestos underwear. Wear it if you intend to partake in a flame war.
And, oh yes, you *are* in a foreign country, so tread lightly and follow local customs (after finding out what they are).
THE DARK SIDE
Okay, it's not all peaches and cream out there. A full newsfeed contains many of the alt (alternative) groups, which includes such things as various forms of pornography, phone phreaking, and other questionable discussion groups. You can generally tell by the name of the group what the main topic of discussion is. If a topic offends you, don't subscribe or read the newsgroup.
Sometimes, however, you might find yourself in a newsgroup comfortably reading about how to rid your cat of fleas, when you discover that someone has posted an obviously off-topic message. It may be just a mistake, or it might be deliberately out and out offensive. In either case, you've stumbled into it - now what?
As in real life, you have some choices to make when something offends you. You can ignore it. Or you can respond somehow.
Generally the best choice is to just move on to the next message. If you choose to respond to the message (directly to the individ- ual, not the newsgroup), you should be prepared to perhaps receive an abusive response back. This may start something you may not want to pursue.
WHERE TO FIND OUT MORE
The following newsgroups contain a wealth of information about the Usenet community:
news.announce.newusers news.answers news.groups news.newusers.questions