A newsgroup is a group of people who send messages to each other on the Internet, publicly. Some of the newsgroup's messages are announcements, some are comments, some are questions, and some are replies.

You can read the newsgroup's messages and write your own message (comment, question, reply or announcement). Your message becomes part of the newsgroup , so you now become part of the newsgroup . If you make your message interesting, other members of the newsgroup will make comments about your message.

If the newsgroup is moderated, a person (who is called the moderator) edits the messages and tries to eliminate the junk. If the newsgroup is unmoderated, the newsgroup is a free-for-all, unedited, uncensored, and always at risk of being dominated by people who make "much ado about nothing" and suffer from "diarrhea of the mouth".

There are over 20,000 newsgroups . The average newsgroup generates over 4 pages of new material per day, so altogether the newsgroups generate over 80,000 pages per day. To reduce the clutter, the typical Internet Service Provider (ISP) discards newsgroup messages that are more than a week old.

The collection of newsgroup is called Usenet. It's part of the Internet.

To find out which newsgroups discuss your favorite topic, use the World Wide Web and go to http://google.com and then click on the groups tab, then type a topic that interest you (and press enter).

The computer will start listing a group of newsgroup messages about that topic, including each message's date, relevancy to subject (score), subject, the newsgroup it came from , and who wrote it.

Decide which newsgroup message you want to read. You can then see the full text by clicking its underlined subject. This is one way to find out information or opinions about a new product or service as well. Click on the link below to see a general category listing of newsgroups .

Resources

See ResourceRecommendations. Feel free to add additional resources to these lists, but please follow the guidelines on ResourceRecommendations including ResourceRecommendations#Guidelines_for_Rating_Resources.

The Secret Guide to Computers by Russ Walter

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• () ValHaring - 15 Aug 2002
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