One of the handiest online tools for reporters is one of the least-used: Usenet newsgroups. They are basically a massive collection of topic-specific bulletin boards that people post millions of messages to every day. For years DejaNews.com made it easy for Web surfers to search and post to newsgroups, but that site went bankrupt last year. Fortunately, the popular search engine Google bought up DejaNews' archives and recently unveiled a new site that every reporter should know how to use. Google Groups is a searchable database of the past 20 years of Usenet archives -- that's more than 700 million messages dating back to 1981, divided into 35,000 topical categories! This will be added to the search engines section of Internet MiniGuides 2004-05.
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:20 AM
