Newsgroups
Newsgroups have often been mistakenly thought of as an area of the Internet only visited by bitheads or computer nerds. Indeed, while newsgroups pre-date the world wide web and may not be as sexy, it is a whole other world unto itself and marketeering aplenty happens there. You can obtain helpful information about your competition and promote yourself as a helpful expert whose website or company should be visited, for example.

There are anywhere from 15,000 to 48,000 or more some odd newsgroups, depending on which groups your particular ISP carries on its news server. Each newsgroup (sometimes also referred to as "Usenet") is typically dedicated to a particular topic.

Topics covered are only limited by human imagination and interest. If there is a topic of interest not available to you, you may even start your own newsgroup. The range of topics is enormous; from the very interesting and extremely helpful, to the boring, and utterly useless.

Just what is a newsgroup? A newsgroup is nothing more than e-mails posted to a public forum for all to see. Those posted which draw comments from other readers become part of a "thread" of messages. Each "child" comment or response is placed directly under and indented from its "parent".

Most web browsers also have the ability to access the news groups. If you haven't set up yours for this, there are two easy things to do.

First, look in your browser's setup, options, or preferences menu. There is usually an area or tab specifically for newsgroups (sometimes it is just called "news"). Don't be surprised if you find it buried in the same area where you adjusted the settings for your e-mail.

If you are still puzzled, the second thing to do is to place a call to your ISP's help desk.

Setting the news properties is very similar to, though more simple than, e-mail. Where your e-mail is often something like: mail.yourisp.net; newsgroups are: news.yourisp.net. You don't have to specify any other items as they are taken automatically from your e-mail settings on an integrated browser.

Your first use of newsgroups will require that you download (or sometimes, "refresh") your ISP's newsgroups. Don't be concerned if this seems to take some time. As mentioned above, there are typically many thousands of newsgroups. Also, it should be noted that you are just downloading the newsgroup names. The actual content of any particular newsgroup, known as the header, still remains to be downloaded.

It is similar to walking into a large, well stocked book store. The books are arranged in sections (read "newsgroups") by category. Discovering individual book titles (read "headers") happens as you go to particular sections and start scanning (read "downloading headers") the shelves. It is useful to know that some newsgroups contain anywhere from several hundred to several thousand current (i.e. not yet read by you) headers. (You can control how many you want to view when downloading new  headers.)

Thankfully, it is more common to find header numbers of a much lower order of magnitude. This is also a good way to judge the popularity of an individual newsgroup.

Newsgroups are listed alphabetically and are in the form: topic.topic.topic.etc. Some of the most eclectic groups are the ALT. groups. These are the "alternative" groups that don't seem to fit other categories. An example of this would be "alt.business". Other groups of interest here would be:

biz.books.technical
biz.comp.accounting
biz.marketplace.web-design
alt.www.marketing

Finally, if you can't find a particular newsgroup which you're sure exists (your favorite brother-in-law insists that you just have to cruise this group...) you can ask your ISP to add it to their listing. Most ISP's will be happy to comply.