NetNews

In 1977, while the Internet was still in its infancy, the first electronic bulletin boards were being created. These first bulletin boards often had multiple conferences each dealing with a specific designated topic. Users of the bbs could move through the various conferences, reading messages posted by other users and posting messages of their own. Unfortunately, different bulletin boards had no way of sharing conferences so that users on either system could contribute messages, limiting the interaction in a conference to only those people who used that particular bulletin board. These stand-alone conferences are called static conferences.

Development in electronic conferencing was rapid though, and in 1979 Tom Truscott and Steve Bellovin designed a protocol which allowed conferences to be distributed between systems automatically. They called their new network of distributed conferences USENET and today it is the largest set of distributed conferences in the world. Their protocol was so well designed that it is still in use to this very day for distributing "newsgroups" across the Internet.

While similar to mailing lists (see lesson 4) newsgroups have several distinct differences. First, the messages are not delivered to your email box. Instead, they reside on a "news server" run by your Internet access provider and you have to use separate news software to read them. Netscape and most other web browsers have newsreaders built into them but you still have to click on a button or choose an option from one of the menus to get to it. One of the advantages of the messages not coming directly to you is that it allows you to only read a newsgroup periodically when you are looking for information on its topic without the bother of continually subscribing and unsubscribing or of having to look at and delete numerous messages every day as you do with busy mailing lists.

Beware though, because there are thousands of newsgroups covering a wide variety of topics and because the volume of messages sent each day via netnews is so high, most newsgroups are not archived and the news server automatically deletes old messages after a prescribed amount of time. If you stop reading a newsgroup for very long you will undoubtedly miss some messages. As you'll quickly find, most news messages are "chatty" and while they can sometimes be quite entertaining they rarely are of a high enough quality that you should be worried about missing them. Netnews is primarily a place for you to ask questions and to discuss interesting topics with peers. Like mailing lists, newsgroups usually have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file that should be consulted before asking a basic question.

As with mailing lists there are usually several different discussions going on in a newsgroup at any one time. If your newsreader only displays messages in chronological order original messages and subsequent replies may be separated by messages from other discussions making following the discussion difficult. For that reason many newsreaders organize messages according to their subject line so that replies appear in order below original messages. Connecting messages in this fashion is called "threading." For example, assume bill@usc.ca.edu writes a message about K12 using the Internet and then sue@bvsd.k12.co.us posts a reply message. At some point carlos@tenet.edu also writes a reply to Bill's message. The newsreader software will thread all three of these messages together. This is done by building a "tree" of messages where Bill's message is the parent and all successive messages are children. If jane@bigsky.dillon.mt.us writes a reply to Carlos' message, then Jane's message is threaded to Carlos' message which is threaded to the original message from Bill. In short, a threaded news reader, enables the user to easily follow on-going conversations composed of successive messages.

If you are using Netscape to read newsgroups, you will notice that the lists of newsgroups and articles are threaded so that they appear connected with dotted lines, much like a family tree. If you are using a different newsreader the messages in a thread may or may not be connected depending on whether it supports threading.