Trivia: The first e-commerce transaction was from a posting on a newsgroup

Newsgroups: Everything you wanted to know and a few things you didn't

There are two types of interactions on the Internet. Synchronous and Asynchronous. E-mails, newsgroups and listservs are asynchronous while Internet phone, IM, and chat groups are synchronous.

Newsgroups were created as a way for "Geeks" to talk about their favorite subject. Newsgroups took off when they became connected to the Internet. Before the Internet, newsgroups were used mainly by universities and people accessed them via phones through bulletin boards.

A newsgroup is a passive method of communicating with a group. You can choose to read the postings and if you wish, you can post to the site. We will use Google's Newsgroup site to explore all the interesting topics in newsgroups. The alt (for alternative) site is the most diverse and the most controversial.

I want you to spend about 30 minutes searching news groups for the a list of the 5 weirdest and the 5 most interesting newsgroups.

Please post your list on Blackboard.

listservs: listservs are an active way for groups to communicate.

To use a listserv, you send a message to a computer whose job is to send your message to all the members of the group. The drawback of listservs is you can easily get a hundred messages a day from an active listserv.