Internet 101: Usenet

From FutureNet : .net 1, Dec '94 - Easy Internet Written by Davey Winder

What is Usenet?
You can view usenet as a world-wide bulletin board system. In each Usnet group, people can talk about different subjects with others who are interested. To give you some sense of scale, in 1994, there was over 150mb of text (nearly 100,000 messages) being posted on a daily basis. People have a lot to say and here is where they can say it.

Each usenet group begins with a header that describes the general category and then gets more specific. Soc.rights.human focuses on human rights.

Codes used in Usenet

• alt: alternative groups, discussing varied things
• bionet: biological groups
• biz: product announcements
• clari: a commercial news service, ClariNet
• comp: discussion about computers
• gnu: the Free Software Federation GNU Project
• misc: miscellaneous stuff
• news: Usenet related news
• rec: recreational matters
• sci: scientific discussion
• soc: social chat, psychology, sociology, and that sort of thing
• talk: rather odd discussions

Spend some time here and look around. Usenet newsgroups can be a lot of fun. However, posting can attract unwanted attention, usually in the form of flaming, if you're not careful. A flame is the on-line equivalent of someone cursing at you from a moving car -- they can't hurt you, but it's certainly not something you want to have happen. Don't worry, though - you can avoid them by simply following this link.

One particularly useful usenet group is soc.org.nonprofit

Netiquete USENETiquete