Newsgroups are an ancient form of many-to-many communication on the internet. It’s like Oprah caught in a loop, a continuous public discussion about a particular topic.

Newsgroups are decentralised, which means that the messages are not maintained on a single server, but are replicated to hundreds around the world. So there’s Oprah, Ricky Lake and several other copies out there, dishing out the same old, same old. Sounds like a lot of redundancy, but newsgroups are highly effective when:

• You don’t need an immediate answer.
• You want to communicate with more than one person.
• You want to communicate with a group of people interested in the same topic.
• You need or want to provide extensive information about that topic.

The main difference between newsgroups and forums (discussion boards) is that most forums are centralised, maintained by the owner on a single server. One example of a centralised collection of forums is maintained by the Internet Movie DataBase at http://www.imdb.com/boards/ Somehow that de/centralisation aspect changes the effectiveness of our second bullet point above, to:

• You want to participate in a community that is discussing a particular topic.

I guess that means you can be passive on the forums, but would be less likely to be so within a newsgroup. Newsgroups use a lot of special terms to describe the newsgroup process. Some noteworthy terms include:

feed

The group of messages that make up a single newsgroup, sent from one server to another server or to a subscriber.

thread

A post and the series of messages replying to it.

Flame

A criticism of someone else’s post.

That’s about it. More about newsgroups can be found at http://computer.howstuffworks.com/newsgroup5.htm. Newsgroups were around before browser-based forums but more or less have the same processes. Nowadays I’d say it comes down to what kind of connection to the internet you have, or simply your preferred interface. For users stuck on a crappy dial-up connection, or who prefer to digest their news in an off-line manner, newsgroups would be nicer.

My ISP, People Telecom, has had a news feed interruption for the past month. I probably should have persisted with the web-based http://www.usenet.com.au but I could do enough in the Windows Mail news reader program. I’ve managed to post a reply to some poor sod who has an interesting error occurring in his/her iTunes installation.

From: “Vernon Fowler”
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.vista.music_pictures_video
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 2:35 PM
Subject: Re: Help! itunes screwed up music folder

There is a preference named “Keep the iTunes music folder organised”. I have
it on, but you may want to try fiddle with it, perhaps off is the best
setting for you.

I’ve attached a screenshot of my iTunes_preferences.gif for your reference.

Still, your version is behaving rather erratically.

“noobie” wrote in message
news:noobie.3bfrjc@DoNotSpam.com…
>
> I installed itunes and then in my music folder, it has like…20 or so
> subfolders created.
> I have tried deleting it, but everytime i open up itunes, it creates a
> new music folder with all of the sub-folders.
> I cant seem to get it to disappear, I’ve tried reinstalling itunes
> twice already with no previal.
> Help please
> I have an attachment of what it looks like below.
>
>
> +——————————————————————-+
> |Filename: Capture.JPG |
> |Download: http://forums.techarena.in/attachment.php?attachmentid=6939|
> +——————————————————————-+
>
> —
> noobie
> ————————————————————————
> noobie’s Profile: http://forums.techarena.in/member.php?u=51919
> View this thread: http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=990401
>
> http://forums.techarena.in
>

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