the university of texas at austin
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCE

USENET News

See Krol, Chapter 8

News are distributed on the Internet from one server to the next, in a never-ending global chain. The protocol used is known as NNTP, network news transfer protocol. Messages are posted, you can reply to them. There are over 5,000 newsgroups, organized into various areas: alt, bionet, bit, biz, comp, de, info, k12, news, rec, sci, soc, talk, misc, etc.

To access the news, you need a newsreader. We'll use "tin", so from your unix prompt type:

	tin
and press return. The first time you use it, you will see an additional help window. Once you get to the list of groups, find the alt.info-science group:
	go alt.info-science
Follow the instructions at the bottom of the screen to read some of the articles in the group.

Look at some of the Austin related groups. Search for the word "Austin" using a /:

	/austin

Try the Usenet FAQ to find more information about specific groups:

	http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/FAQ-List.html

Exercise

Week 2 page