Don't ask me how the name News Groups originated, because the vast majority of  news groups have little to do with news. They are similar to mailing lists in content and purpose, but unlike mailing lists the information isn't delivered directly to your  mail box. When a message is sent to the group, rather than generating a mail message to everyone who subscribes to the group, the messages are sent to your network or service provider's server and are read by users via news reader software.

Newsgroups have significant advantages over mailing lists. Since individual messages aren't sent there is less of a load on the servers and your mailbox won't get flooded with messages. You don't have to subscribe and unsubscribe. Anyone  can read any news group at any time, provided it is made available by your system administrator.

There are well over 6,000 news groups in Usenet, the largest news group system.  There are many more news groups on other network systems, brining the total to somewhere around 60,000. Providing all of them would not be productive. Many megabytes of information would have to be downloaded daily and most of it would  go unread. Usenet pumps out about 40 million characters a day. Therefore most system administrators carry only the news groups that are of most benefit to their users.

Depending on the software your system is using, you might be able to create your own personal list of news groups from those provided on your system. That way you see only what your are interested in and not every group.

News groups are arranged in a particular hierarchy that was developed in the 1980s. The naming convention starts out with a broad topic and narrows the scope with each successive name part. For example, news groups beginning with 'comp.'  are about computers. This broad topic is followed by narrower topics. So 'comp.unix' is about Unix computers and 'comp.ibm' is obviously about IBMs.

The main groupings are:
bionet           Research biology
bit.listserve    Conferences that start as Binet mailing lists
biz              Business
clari            Commercial services that actually deal with news
comp             Computers and related subjects
misc             Discussions that don't fit anywhere else
news             News about Usenet itself
rec              Recreations, hobbies, etc.
sci              Science other than biology
soc              Social groups, often ethically oriented
talk             Politics and related topics
alt              Controversial, unusual, or frivolous topics

Getting started can be intimidating, but there are some news groups of particular interest to new users.

news.announce.newusers          Contains a series of articles 
                                explaining Usenet.
news.newusers.questions         Ask questions about Usenet here.
news.announce.newsgroups        New and proposed news group
                                information
news.answers                    Lists of FAQs about many
                                newsgroups

If you see a news group of interest that isn't offered at your location you should check with your system administrator or Internet service provider.

If you don't like the idea of reading through 12,000 titles you can visit the DejaNews web site.  DejaNews provides access to newsgroups thorugh the World Wide Web.

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