A newsgroup is an Internet discussion group on a particular topic. It works in a very similar fashion to e-mail mailing lists. Users of a particular group "post" an article that other users can respond to thus starting a "thread" about that article. On most busy newsgroups there can be several different "threads" or discussions going on at once.

Since there are several different topics that are covered by newsgroups, newsgroups are organized in a hierarchy. The following sections are the most popular:

• alt. - This section is for "any topic" most of the groups in here are on alternative topics
• biz. - Discussion of business issues, products, and services
• comp. - Computer hardware and software groups are here
• humanities. - Discussions of art, literature, etc
• misc. - A miscellaneous section
• news. - This group is for discussing newsgroups themselves
• rec. - Recreational groups (sports, games, etc.) are here
• sci. - Discussion groups for science related topics
• soc. - Social and cultural topics
• talk. - Discussion of current events and general debate

Within the upper-level categories above, there is an organization system for all the newsgroups under a particular topic. Here are a few examples to give you a feel for how newsgroups are listed:

• alt.philosophy.taoism - This group is for discussion of the philosophy taoism
• comp.os.ms-windows.networking.tcp-ip - This group discusses how the operating system (os) Microsoft Windows (ms-windows) handles networking (networking) using the TCP/IP protocol (tcp-ip)
• soc.history.war.us-civil-war - This groups is dedicated to a discussion of US Civil War history.

Since there's a hierarchy involved, there are usually more than one group under any one heading. For example, there is the soc.history.war.us-civil-war example above, but there is also a soc.history.war.vietnam group about the Vietnam war and a soc.history.war.world-war-ii about World War II.

Since newsgroups can have several different discussions going on at once and a lot of people talking, there can be a lot of traffic in many of the more active lists. This translates over to a lot of downloading and disk space required if you read your newsgroups with a program such as Outlook Express.

If you are unsure whether newsgroups are something that you want to get involved in or not we recommend that you try looking at the newsgroups archives at Google. Apart from being a search engine, Google maintains a webpage interface for newsgroups where people can browse through many of the more popular newsgroups and even reply to posts there if you sign up for an account with them.

Setting up Newsgroups Software

If you want something more permanent than Google Groups, you can set up practically any e-mail software you're using to read newsgroups as well. Set your news reader to use the NNTP news server: news.rtmx.net