06 What Is Usenet?
Description
This article is from the Psychology FAQ, by Rolf Marvin Bøe Lindgren roffe@tag.uio.no with numerous contributions by others.
06 What Is Usenet?
Usenet is a network of electronic bulletin boards, more formally known
as News or Internet News. Most colleges and Internet Service Providers
provide acces to News, both for reading and posting.
SOFTWARE
If you are using a Macintosh, use NewsWatcher, InterNews, Nuntius or
one of their derivatives.
If you are using a Windows or OS/2-based PC, use WinVn or Agent.
If you are using a line-oriented UNIX shell account use GNUS under GNU
Emacs, pine, slrn, or tin. If you have access to X Windows, you might
consider xrn.
I recommend not using Web browsers such as Netscape, Mosaic or the
like for reading News. There are two main reasons for this: firstly,
that these programs lack several important features such as kill
files, and proper editing facilitites; secondly, at least Netscape
uses as default a character encoding mechanism which is incompatible
with the way most other newsreaders work. If you have to use Netscape,
at least turn on Allow 8-bit and turn off MIME Compliant (Quoted
Printable) (Options -> Mail and News preferences).
Also, make sure that the character set you are using is eiher us ascii
or iso8859-1.
THE IMPORTANCE OF KILL FILES
The volume on the psychology-related news groups is very high, and
many items might not be of interest to you. A kill file can help
keeping the noise level down. All of the above mentioned newsreaders
(but not Netscape, which is why I advise against using it) support
kill files to a lesser or greater extent, and have a variety of nice
features.
WHICH NEWSGROUPS ARE OF INTEREST
There are two main hierarchies for psychology-related newsgroups, the
sci and the alt hierarchies. The newsgroups of the alt hierarchy are
too numerous to be listed here. The newsgroups of the sci hierarchy
are dedicated to the scientific discussion of psychology. Some of them
are moderated, which means that articles are screened for relevance
before they are posted.
sci.psychology.announce
- Announcement of psychology conferences, etc (moderated)
sci.psychology.consciousness
- On the nature of consciousness (moderated)
sci.psychology.journals.psyche
- E-journal on consciousness (Psyche) (moderated)
sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy
- E-journal on psychology (Psycoloquy) (moderated)
sci.psychology.misc
- General discussion of psychology
sci.psychology.personality
- All personality systems & measurement
sci.psychology.psychotherapy
- Practice of psychotherapy
sci.psychology.research
- Research issues in psychology (moderated)
sci.psychology.theory
- Theories of psychology & behavior
A comprehensive list of psychology-related newsgroups can be found at
http://www.coil.com/ grohol/news.htm.
Continue to:
My Books
