This document is an annotated version of the Demo 8 Web page linked to the Week 5 section of the course home page.  This smaller type is used to distinguish annotations from original text.  The reason for this document is that class time did not permit finishing this lecture/discussion in Class 5.

Usenet is a very important part of the "Discussion Groups and Virtual Communities" module.  It is old, venerable, and still a rapidly-growing part of the Internet.  Its content can be very useful on almost any topic.  Moreover, it has some important lessons to teach about forming and sustaining themed discussion groups.

Demo 8 and your DejaNews experience in Homework 3 help set the stage for your work with Usenet newsgroups as part of Homework 8.
 
Giant client-server app for global affinity groups, each like a communal, self-flushing email account
Imagine an email in-basket that you share with many other people.  You, or any of these other people, can send mail to it, reply to mail, forward mail, and save mail.  The one thing you can't do is delete mail (though you can mark it as having been read).  Deletion is at the discretion of some fascist computer somewhere, and occurs with maddening frequency.
 
Why should you care?
There is a companion document by Max Moroz on the course home page with the link name "Supplementary Comments".  It explains how he used Usenet to help inform a purchase that he wanted to make.
    Personal help (Q&A, opinion, disc, etc.)
    Find people, products, services, partners
    Provide tech support, customer services
Some companies take advantage of this option to serve their customers, but most are blissfully ignorant of this possibility.
    Marketing medium
    Customer pulse: prod, services, events
       User content waiting to be harnessed
Companies that fail to "listen in" on their customers in this way are really missing the boat.
    Insights re virtual communities

Italics below is used for important jargon you need to know.
Usenet comprises:

    Newsgroups (30-50,000)
    News servers everywhere
There are more than 300,000 news servers, most serving just a single organization.  But some have global scope.
        news.anderson.ucla.edu
Our news server carries around 12,000 newsgroups.  The campus server listed next carries even more.
        news.ucla.edu
        Each has a news administrator
            Which newsgroups to carry
Usually the omitted newsgroups tend to be very new, or raunchy, or inactive, or so local to somewhere else that they would likely be of little interest to the intended clientele.
            When to purge articles
As of 5/98, news administrator Wesley Wong keeps alt.* for 1.5 days (but high noise and high traffic groups such as alt.sex.* and alt.test are kept just 0.5 day), anderson.* for 15 days, foreign groups for 2 days, and most everything else (incl. standard comp.*, talk.*, rec.*) for 4 days.  The policy for the campus server is a bit different: 5-14 days if the group is being read and the article is not a binary, and 2 days if the group is not being read or the article is a binary (binaries tend to be much larger than text files).
  News feeds of articles (posts)
At the AGSM news server, there are about 300,000 new posts per day consuming about 500 MB!
If you post an article, it will be available locally almost right away, nationally in a day or so, and globally in a couple of days.  This traffic uses NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol), one of the TCI/IP protocols.  Other TCP/IP protocols include SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
    Newsreaders (client software)
We will use Collabra (part of Netscape Communicator) as our newsreader, but there are many others.
        > 15 million people
With this number of people, which is growing rapidly, newsgroups can get a LOT of readers.  The most popular ones get 100,000 -700,000 regular readers!
    Free, no central management
The trick to getting rid of management is to set good standards.  Note that the situation is very different for similar discussion groups available on AOL and CompuServe.

Articles (similar to e-mail)
    Parts: header, body, signature
These are the same parts as email messages, but the header is quite different.  There are about 20 header lines, of which only a dozen or so are important.
    New postings vs. follow-up (thread)
Email readers, in contrast, have little or no support for message threads (messages that reply to other messages).
    Strong culture (news.announce.newusers)
For example, you will make people angry unless you: read a newsgroup's traffic awhile and its FAQ (if there is one) before posting to it, keep your posts short, and reply to people individually instead of to the whole group unless others would be interested.

Newsgroups (each has affinity theme)
    Organized (named) in hierarchies
There are more than 100 hierarchies, the most important of which are listed on the next line.  The abbreviations stand for Alternative (really miscellaneous), Computers, News about Usenet, Recreation including hobbies and the arts, Science, Social issues, and ClariNet (UCLA has a site license to carry these more than 600 read-only newsgroups that are composed from the UPI newsfeed and quite a few syndicated columnists).
        alt, comp, news, rec, sci, soc, clari …
The hierarchies use naming conventions much like your PC uses for its file structure, with dots instead of slashes to denote directories.  For example, jumping into the middle of the rec hierarchy ...
        rec.skiing
        rec.skydiving
        rec.sport.baseball
            rec.sport.baseball.college
        rec.* has around 800
rec.* refers to all newsgroups in the rec hierarchy.
    Some moderated
Not many are blessed with a moderator, but the ones that are tend to be of higher overall quality.
    Some have periodic postings
    e.g., FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
There are more than 3,000 FAQs.  Many are wonderfully useful documents because so many people have helped purge them of errors and fix sins of omission.
        Often amazingly accurate, complete
        Cross-posted to news.answers
The news.answers newsgroup is supposed to contain all FAQs from all newsgroups.  Some hierarchies have more specific versions of this, such as comp.answers for all the FAQs about computers.  You might take a look at comp.publish.cdrom.multimedia for an example FAQ.  You can find it at:
                www.faqs.org/faqs/

Annotations will essentially stop at this point.  Homework 8 suggests an approach to learning Collabra, and the outline below can serve as a kind of checklist of what you should be able to do.  In addition to the information available from Netscape (e.g., here or, more particularly, here), you may wish to consult an independent tutorial such as the one at Penn State or the one at the University of Wisconsin.
Newsreader (e.g., Collabra)
    Newsgroup navigation
        Find newsgroups
            Browse all
            Search all
You can search by name, but not by newsgroup description or articles
        Keep a short list (subscription)
Your subcription list is totally private; it is not sent to any other computer.  No one will know that you subscribe to alt.cars.repo-techniques .
        Select newsgroup to read
    Article navigation (within newsgroup)
        Presentation of articles
            Threaded or flat
            Sort order (header field)
            Visible Fields
        Find articles
Find works just one newsgroup at a time.
            Browse all
            Search all (by Subject, Sender)
        Select article to read
        Keep track of articles you've read
    Reading articles (on-line, off-line)
    Saving articles (print, file)
    Composing articles

DejaNews www.dejanews.com
    Usenet archives to 3/95 (~ 475 GB)
    Search engine
        Newsgroups (most)
        Articles (~ 270 M)