| Ongoing
discussions that are spread around by email among people on the
Internet who share a common interest.
A newsgroup is a discussion
about a particular subject consisting of notes written to a central
Internet site and redistributed through Usenet, a worldwide network
of news discussion groups. Usenet uses the Network News Transfer
Protocol (NNTP).
Newsgroups are organized into
subject hierarchies, with the first few letters of the newsgroup
name indicating the major subject category and sub-categories
represented by a subtopic name. Many subjects have multiple levels
of subtopics. Some major subject categories are: news, rec
(recreation), soc (society), sci (science), comp (computers), and so
forth (there are many more). Users can post to existing newsgroups,
respond to previous posts, and create new newsgroups. |
