Usenet News Groups (and Dejanews)
By Jill Soley
Broadcast news programs (on television and the Internet) are great
for learning about breaking news. They are also great for getting
the dirt on major scandals like the O.J. Simpson trial and the Monica
Lewinsky mess. However, these sources only provide certain kinds of
news and limited perspectives, leaving plenty of room for the Internet
to provide other news models in addition to the traditional broadcast
model. One of the most successful of these models is the Usenet Newsgroups,
allowing people all over the world to share knowledge and differing
perspectives on any number of topics.
Usenet Newsgroups have existed for many years. They were started
at Duke University in 1979 as a series of electronic bulletin boards,
allowing people to share information. (Remember, this was before the
ubiquity of email.) Usenet Newsgroups allow anyone to start a newsgroup
or a new thread within a group and post messages. Newsgroups exist
on topics ranging from talk.politics.european-union to alt.sex.bondage
to biz.healthcare to alt.tv.survivor-series.sucks. One of the interesting
things about about Usenet, historically, is that:
No person or group has authority over Usenet as a whole. No one controls
who gets a news feed, which articles are propagated where, who can
post articles, or anything else. There is no "Usenet Incorporated,"
nor is there a "Usenet User's Group." You're on your own.("What
is Usenet?")
This organically grown database has become an indispensable resource
for many Internet users. It is a community of sorts, or thousands
of communities, in which people with no connection to each other share
information about common interests and help each other for no reward.
Over the years, as the collection of information on Usenet servers
has grown to an immense size, various individuals and organizations
archived the threads and provided interfaces to search them. Dejanews
is one of the most popular of these because it is free. Dejanews allowed
users to search its database of newsgroups dated back to 1995 and
troll through threaded discussions to find relevant information. Google
Inc., however, recently purchased Dejanews archive to add to its search
engine and services. As Google explains in its press release, "With
more than 500 million individual messages and growing fast, Usenet
and its thriving community is one of the most active and valuable
information sources on the Internet."
Active Dejanews users are frustrated by Google s changes to the site.
The format has changed to a much less usable form and it has lost
functionality. Users can no longer skim through a thread for the appropriate
posting. Google also seems to search through only some of the archive.
One frustrated exclaimed to me, Can you tell I'm more than a little
ticked!! I would happily have shelled out $$$ for the service the
way it was!
Hopefully, the quest for an online business model won t force Google
to start charging for Usenet access or drastically change the Usenet
groups. Though there are many websites with various discussion boards,
the Usenet groups are a one-stop resource for answers to questions
and obscure information (especially computer related news and information).
This many-to-many model for sharing news and information in no way
replaces the broadcast model. We need to have a single source for
information, a source we can reliably access and trust. (Whether or
not we can trust our current news sources is an entirely separate
question.) However, there are many sides to every subject and it is
important to have a place to share and to learn from those perspectives,
experiences, and ideas. Could the Usenet newsgroups be improved? Of
course. There are an overwhelming number of groups and a better organization
of them might make searching easier. There is also a fair amount of
spam that doesn t get filtered out since not all groups are moderated.
However, this is simply an inevitability of opening the floor to everyone.
Active groups manage to moderate themselves pretty well in general
and the benefits of open access far outweigh the liabilities.
Online communities are difficult to create (if you build it, they
won t necessarily come) and to manage. However, the ability for many-to-many
communication is one of the Internet s major defining features. It
would be a shame for a few companies to gain control and remove that
functionality.