Usenet: Old New Media
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 <<–usenet
Perhaps some of have heard of Usenet, others have not. Either way, I am willing to bet that most of us have never have had any direct experience with Usenet, let alone use it. I have never previously had any firsthand experience with Usenet or Newsgroups, (except Google Groups) and always have been somewhat fascinated by this early Internet bastion, especially when I hear people say it is really good for file sharing 
So first I had to answer one question to start my quest: What is Usenet, anyway? From the official word from the Internet on the Internet:
“Usenet (a contraction of user network) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet
discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP
architecture of the same name…One notable difference from a ….web forum is that there is no central server, nor central system owner. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers which store and forward messages to one another. These servers are loosely connected in a variable mesh.[clarify
] Individual users usually read from and post messages to a local server operated by their ISP
, university or employer. The servers then exchange the messages between one another, so that they are available to readers beyond the original server.”
Great, whatever Usenet is, my university probably gives me access. I begin to remember that some of the Ph.D students talking about how universities used to be huge nodes online, allowing them faster internet access to tons of text based interconnected communities, in times before a graphical web browser. So I set out in search of NYU Usenet server!
One fatefull Google search later, and i found this
News Servers
The NYU USENET news service was retired on June 1, 2007. You can read more regarding the retirement here. While extremely active in its prime, today NYU USENET has been superseded by other technologies and services. For example, several alternatives exist for access to USENET services:
- Home access: Local internet services providers (including dial-up, cable modem and DSL providers) typically offer USENET services.
- Free global access: Services such as Google Groups provide free access to the text-based newsgroups.
- Pay-for access: Giganews and Supernews offer access to all newsgroups, including the “binaries” newsgroups, for a monthly fee.
uh oh. Retired?!?!? Really? Am I really getting in over my head? Â Luckily I was given a few links by NYU to point me in the right direction, so I tried clicking on Giga News to see what happens.
Whoa, it costs money? Â Of all of the wonderful things that are on the Internet, I don’t pay for any of it. And while 20 bucks a month for unlimited bandwidth sounds great, I don’t even know what I am really going to be doing! My university used to give it to me for free, but now they won’t so now I have to pay. I decided I needed a little more learning on the subject.
Luckily, the Wired magazine how to wiki shed some light onto how to go about using Usenet, and it is a pretty complicated process. Go here to check it out. Turns out there are some free public server, which don’t offer the speed and reliability that paid Usenet sites traditionally do.
Pretty much the way it works is that by setting up a “newsreader” one can traverse the node of usenet, running through different groups, which are essentially a massive list of bulletin boards about very specific topics (see below):
Also, there are tons of files hosted within these groups, everything from software to music to movies. And for being the granddaddy of P2P services (it is not actually peer to peep, just tons of filesharing) Usenet has kept a quiet rap from the RIAA and MPAA even though it has been around long before Napster, Limewire and BitTorrent.
Once I got onto a public Usenet service, I actually ended up being kicked off because Grabit, the program I was using to look at these groups, said I needed to pony up some cash to use it any more. With that, I set my sites for next week in joining and downloading tons of stuff on a paid Usenet server!
Howard Rheingold talks a lot about Usenet in his book Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Virtual Frontier. It online here http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html
Also, is the Well still up and running?