Newsgroups

Imagine a conversation carried out over a period of hours and days, as if people were leaving messages and responses on a notice board. Or imagine the electronic equivalent of a radio talk show where everybody can air their opinion and no one is ever on hold.

Unlike email, which is usually "one-to-one", newsgroups (sometimes called Usenet) are "many-to-many".

Usenet is the international meeting place, where people gather to meet their friends or colleagues, keep up with market trends or talk about whatever's on their mind.

If you access the Internet by dialling up to an Internet Service Provider, then your ISP may have a server that is used to store millions of Usenet messages for you to download and read.

Yes, millions.

For Usenet is huge. Every day, people pump upwards of 40 million characters a day into Usenet system - roughly the equivalent of volumes A-G of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Obviously, nobody could possibly keep up with this immense flow of messages. Rather people will focus on the topics or groups that interest them.

The basic building block of Usenet is the newsgroup, which is a collection of messages with a related theme. There are now more than 80,000 of these newsgroups, in several different languages, covering everything from art to zoology, from marketing to legal groups and the list is still growing daily.

Some example newsgroups are:

Whilst no one can doubt the sheer volume of the daily input to Usenet, it's worth remembering that high quantity does not, necessarily, mean high quality. Anybody with an opinion can post anything in a Usenet newsgroup, whether they know what they are talking about or not. For safety's sake it is always wise to pass any such information through your own common sense/reality check first. If people state new "facts" in their Usenet messages, ask them for their sources and check these out yourself before accepting everything you read.