Making Money with an Internet Business

The next step up in Internet information dissemination is Usenet newsgroups. If mailing lists are like a post office that can automatically make copies of your message and distribute it worldwide, Usenet is the public library, where each site covers a discussion on a specific topic.
Currently, there are over 7,000 Usenet newsgroups with far-ranging discussions on a dizzying array of topics ranging from HyperCard programming on the Macintosh to magazine writing, the best places to eat in the San Francisco area to the moral implications and ramifications of abortion in U.S. society.
As with mailing lists, the two primary types of Usenet newsgroups are moderated and unmoderated. Most groups are unmoderated, and anything anyone submits, or “posts,” in Internet lingo, to the group is quickly distributed to all sites on the network and available to everyone who participates in that particular discussion group.
Moderated groups have all submissions automatically sent to an individual or committee that screens the articles for appropriateness, and if acceptable, posts them to the group. Delays of many days are common with moderated newsgroups, but when a small Usenet group can have 5,000 participants, you might find yourself quickly seeking shelter from the barrage of information.
As with mailing lists, you also have to subscribe to Usenet newsgroups, but the good news is that the entire process takes place on your local Internet service provider computer rather than through electronic mail on a remote computer.
Now for the catch: A wide variety of programs are available for reading Usenet news, and they are dramatically different from each other. With the proliferation of Mac and PC computers on the Internet, graphically-based readers are also becoming available, further complicating things. Worse yet, different Internet access providers offer a different subset of the Usenet readers. For example, Dave prefers a program called tin for reading Usenet news, and although it’s available on Netcom, it isn’t available on the computer he uses at Purdue University, so he uses another program called rn for Purdue-related newsgroups. Rosalind, by contrast, relies on WinNET Mail, a Windows-based news reader.
As a result of the plethora of Usenet interfaces, we debated (through electronic mail!) which would be the best reader to use for the examples in this site. Our conclusion was that tin offered the best balance between common accessibility and sophisticated interface.
Don’t be surprised, however, if things aren’t immediately obvious. Like all Usenet software, tin takes a while to master. Worse, it’s difficult to figure out what Usenet groups are available, and few of the programs offer any capabilities to help. Your best bet is to ask your Internet access provider for a listing of the groups available including descriptions (if that puzzles them, ask whether they have a file on the system called / usr/lib/ news/ newsgroups). It’s a huge file, and we used a simple utility to show just the groups that have the phrase biz within their names.