October 26, 2001

Connect with ‘real’ people on the Internet

Edi­tors note: This is one of sev­eral columns that I wrote for the Colum­bia Mis­sourian. They were orig­i­nally called Your Dig­i­tal World

Every morn­ing, I boot up Gina, (that’s what my fiancée has named my PC), and I surf the news sites. But before I leave my apart­ment in the morn­ing I absolutely have to check for any new mes­sages on the Bul­letin Board System I read.

It’s just one of sev­eral ways people can use the Inter­net to com­mu­ni­cate with each other. With all the talk about e-tailing and e-commerce it’s easy to forget that people do the point and clicking.

So what are some ways to inter­act with real people on the Inter­net? This week, let’s talk about BBSs, e-mail groups and news­groups. BBSs – Long before the Inter­net there were people who used their com­puter and modem to host a BBS. Just like a cork board in an office break room, people post mes­sages, and others come by and read them. The Inter­net explo­sion put the older, modem-​based sys­tems out of busi­ness, but they were rein­car­nated on the Web.

On most BBSs, you click on a mes­sage to read it and can read the replies to that mes­sage. This string of inter­re­lated mes­sages is known as a thread. For me, I spend a few min­utes each morn­ing at TrekBBS, (www.​trekbbs.com). Yes, I like Star Trek. Let the jokes commence….

BBSs are pas­sive, you have to visit the site to see the new mes­sages. They also aren’t very inter­ac­tive, unless you spend a lot of time hit­ting the refresh button on your Web browser wait­ing for posts on a thread.

To find a BBS that inter­ests you, check out some of the sites you visit often and look for a link to dis­cus­sion groups. (I found TrekBBS from www.​trek​to​day.com).

E-mail groups – Often called list­serves, (or list­servs), these groups are not as pas­sive as BBSs.

When you send an e-mail to a list­serve, the mes­sage gets dis­trib­uted to every­one on a list, (hence the clever name). Many offices use these to send out memos to a large group, and many a person has acci­den­tally sent a mes­sage to the group instead of one person … oops.

Out­side the office, a lot of e-mail newslet­ters are sent using list­serves. I’m signed up for sev­eral that send me infor­ma­tion about tech sup­port. Groups don’t have to be used for just announce­ments. At the Mis­sourian, I’m on a list that copy edi­tors use to dis­cuss our craft.

Once you find an e-mail group you’d like to join you usu­ally send an e-mail to a spe­cial address that sub­scribes you to the group (or later, to a spe­cial one that unsub­scribes you.) A lot of Web pages, espe­cially news sites, use groups to send break­ing news to your inbox, and have a sub­scrip­tion form on the site that you can type your address into.

For an exam­ple of a dis­cus­sion e-mail group, and a shame­less plug, sign up for our dis­cus­sion group over on the left.

E-mail groups are more inter­ac­tive than BBSs, but not as much as chat rooms and instant mes­sag­ing. For the low down on those check out next week’s YDW.

News­groups – These are the miss­ing link between BBSs and Web dis­cus­sion boards.

These post-​Internet yet pre-​Web cre­ations are a lot like bul­letin boards. People post mes­sages to them and read­ers must take the active step of down­load­ing the message.

The way they differ from Web-​based BBSs is that you must use spe­cial soft­ware to use them.

Out­look Express has a built in news reader and comes with most Win­dows sys­tems and is a free down­load for Mac­in­toshes (www.​microsoft.​com/mac). Most Inter­net Ser­vice Providers run a news server, which allows you to access the mes­sages. You’ll need to con­tact your ISP to get the address of the server.

Once you’re con­nected to the server you need to sub­scribe to groups. They use a rather impos­ing naming scheme. The topics are hier­achi­cal and sep­a­rated by peri­ods. For exam­ple a group about Roy Orbi­son might be called rec.music.oldies.artists.royorbison.

A good way to find groups your inter­ested in is to head to groups.​goole.com. You can search the group titles and their mes­sages. You can also read and post mes­sages there, but be wary of giving out your true e-mail address, a lot of evil doers scan the groups for addresses to send unso­licited adver­tis­ing to.

(If you haven’t heard Weird Al Yankovic’s song “It’s all about the Pentium’s” check it out, it’s hilar­i­ous. After read­ing this you’ll under­stand the joke about “alt.total.loser.”)

Filed under: Technology

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