Newsgroups are very similar to Message Boards, except that while Message Boards are always found on the Web, Newsgroups are from a part of the Internet that predates the Web, called Usenet. (In fact, just to be technical, Usenet is not a part of the Internet, but it is accessible through the Internet… most people don't know the difference. Or care.) Originally, newsgroups were used to spread news about their subjects; now, there is no pretense of such a limitation, and you can find all kinds of things discussed and posted here. There are about 40,000 different Newsgroups, each dedicated to a particular subject or interest. The name of the group tells you the subject under discussion. Well, okay, at least it's usually close.

Not all ISPs (Internet Service Providers, come on, you should know these by now) will give you Usenet access, and not all ISPs give you access to all of the possible groups. But Google has archived a large number (they claim thirty-six thousand) of the available Newsgroups, and continues to do so. You can search and access these through your Web browser, regardless of whether or not your ISP allows you Usenet access.

Usenet group names look like this: alt.subject.subheading. If you look at the parts of the name, separated by dots (golly, we used to call those "periods"), you'll see that it's a hierarchy, meaning the name starts out generally descriptive and gets more precise as you read from left to right, just like a Website URL. With Usenet, they all start with a prefix, which gives you the general area - the very general area - of the group's subject of interest. There are thousands of hierarchies and group prefixes. Here are some of the more common ones:

• alt. - this used to mean alternative, as in "an alternative approach to" whatever-the-subject-in-the-rest-of-the-name-is. This was back in the days when the Internet was full of college kids and society's young rebels. Now, it more or less means "this group is about anything", because yesterday's rebels are today's mainstream.
• rec. - subjects dealing with recreation
• comp. - computer related
• sci. - science
• soc. - social and societal areas
• net. - network or Internet related
• For a complete list of all Usenet name hierarchies, go to www.magma.ca/~leisen/mlnh/mlnhtables.html.

All Newsgroups are open to everyone that has access to Usenet. But since it dates from the early days of the Internet, Usenet remains a favorite part of the Net for those people who know more about computers and the Internet than most of us; we might unkindly call them geeks or hackers. Newsgroup postings are text only, and lack the pretty formatting that you are used to seeing on the Web (as well as some of the Message Boards' abilities, like private messaging).