Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online
5.5. What is a local newsgroup?
Thousands of newsgroups are local where discussions are in and about
specific geographic areas. These newsgroups are a great way to communicate with
folks in your city, state, college, or country, but they're usually wholly
uninteresting to everyone outside that area. There is at least one local
newsgroup for every state and province in the U.S. and Canada plus thousands
more for people in every county that's plugged into the Internet. Local groups
allow New Yorkers to discuss the best restaurants in New York City, for
example, but not waste disk space on a machine in Sao Paulo or Hong Kong.
The names of local newsgroups look just like global Usenet groups, except the
first part is an initial for the location name. For example, atl groups
are for Atlanta, Georgia, and ab groups are for Alberta, Canada. Here
are some examples:
- ab.general Items of general interest in Alberta, Canada
- ab.jobs Jobs in Alberta, Canada
- ab.politics Discussion of politics in Alberta, Canada.
- atl.general Items of general interest in Atlanta, GA.
- atl.jobs Jobs in Atlanta, GA
- atl.olympics The Olympics in Atlanta, GA
- atl.resumes
Resumes in Atlanta, GA
Other local newsgroups have different prefixes. For example:
- aus Australia
- ba San Francisco Bay Area
- bc British Columbia
- bln Berlin
- boulder Boulder, Colorado
- brasil Brazil
- br Britain
- ca California
- cam Cambridge, Massachusetts
- dk Denmark
- hsv Huntsville, Alabama
- pnw Pacific Northwest
- ri Rhode Island
- tamu Texas A&M
University
To find local newsgroups in your area, try using your newsreader to search for
groups with your location's initials or name. (Use the initials of your state,
province, or country.) Of course. you can also ask someone in the know (such as
your system administrator) what your local newsgroups are called.
Dave Taylor says, "There are also organizational domains within companies on
the Internet and network access firms like Netcom, Software Tool and Die, and
the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. These can be recognized by the similarity
between the domain name and the organizational name. Some examples: hp.
are groups within Hewlett-Packard, apple. for Apple Computer,
purdue. for Purdue University, ucb. for the University of
California at Berkeley, netcom. for Netcom local newsgroups,
world. for The World, and well. for the Whole Earth 'Lectronic
Link. You probably won't be able to access most of these--particularly the
corporate ones that often are a hotbed for discussion of company internal
information and projects.
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