Practical Internet Groupware

The Dynamics of Site-Specific Public Newsgroups

Following Netscape’s lead, other high-tech companies began hosting site-specific newsgroups. One of these was BYTE, where I launched a news server that enabled BYTE’s widely dispersed staff to meet and converse with its even more widely dispersed readership. That server, which was the standard InterNet News (INN) 1.4 included with my Caldera Linux kit (see the following tip), immediately paid us a huge dividend. I was planning a cover story for the magazine, a process that for me typically involved weeks of telephone interviews with vendors and users whose perspectives would shape the story. The real challenge had always been simply to find the right people to interview. This is a classic networking problem, in the social sense of networking. We use the people we do know to find the people we don’t know. But isn’t the Internet the ultimate power tool for social networking? To test that proposition, I started a thread in one of my newsgroups, outlining my plan for the cover story and inviting discussion of it. Then I advertised the thread on our home page.

Note

Setting up your own news server is a lot like setting up a web server—install the software, configure some settings, create a directory structure, and turn it on. See Chapter 13, for details on doing this with various kinds of NNTP servers, on both Linux and NT.

The latest servers from Microsoft and Netscape come with GUI administration tools that turn most of this stuff into ...