deja.com

.../>

Deja.com used to be a absolutely cracking service which gave you access to the wonderful and frightening world of newsgroups. About a year or so ago, it ran into difficulties and disappeared from view for a while. But then, those wonderful people from Google.com took up the cause, bought up deja.com and relaunched it under their very successful wing, branding it as part of their marvellous stable of products.

If ...
...with the acquisition of the deja.com newsgroup machine, they’ve also got the best manager of newsgroups there is. World domination beckons and only Mrs D and her invincible (and totally inedible) rice pudding and roast chicken dinners can save us….


The newsgroup is an incredibly useful, but, at the same time, incredibly useless form of communication which offers access to people interested in one particular subject and is an ... more

This is how to really piss people off....

1. Go to www.deja.com and sign up
2. Join as many newsgroups as you can from the deja site
3. Send an abusive, nasty, unpleasant message or ad to every single one of those groups with a couple of keystrokes
4. Sit back and wait for all your new found chums to make contact and politely converse with them
5. Sign up with a new E-mail provider cos you'll sure as hell get kicked off your current one!

SUBTLE HINT: I'm being very, very sarcastic and under no circumstances, WHATSOEVER, should you do any of this because if you do, you will certainly suffer the slings and arrows of all sorts of outraged newsgroup hounds and your E-mail provider, so PLEASE BE WARNED!

(I don’t know - dave27 having to issue a Government Health Warning, whatever next?)

Deja.com used to be a absolutely cracking service which gave you access to the wonderful and frightening world of newsgroups. About a year or so ago, it ran into difficulties and disappeared from view for a while. But then, those wonderful people from Google.com took up the cause, bought up deja.com and relaunched it under their very successful wing, branding it as part of their marvellous stable of products.

If you key in to www.deja.com, you will still get directed to the site, but it’s safer now to use http://groups.google.com/ or even visit the main www.google.com site and click on the ‘Groups’ link.

Now, as everyone but the biggest dunderhead knows, Google runs the best search engine in the world, and with the acquisition of the deja.com newsgroup machine, they’ve also got the best manager of newsgroups there is. World domination beckons and only Mrs D and her invincible (and totally inedible) rice pudding and roast chicken dinners can save us….

The newsgroup is an incredibly useful, but, at the same time, incredibly useless form of communication which offers access to people interested in one particular subject and is an excellent source of information and opinion. There is a newsgroup for virtually every subject you can think of, including the most obscure - dwarf puppies, gold cutlery, sheep rustlers, people who think Danny Mills should be the England right back (cheers, brianlfc). At the same time, they are stereotypically populated by the sort of Supergeek depicted as the Comic Store Guy on The Simpsons. Sharing cyberspace with them are that happy bunch of individuals known as the Spammers, the Abusers, the Not Nice Brigade. For it’s extremely easy to get an ad for an Internet scam broadcast to an enormous chunk of the population with (hardly) any barriers. You can cross post to thousands of newsgroups (if that takes your fancy) very easily with very little effort, and it’s that sort of vulnerability to abuse that really gets newsgroups a bad name. Such actions will usually lead in the end to the Spammer losing their E-mail account, because a lot of the newsgroup hounds get fanatically annoyed about such flagrant cold calling and corruption of their own little private chunk of cyberspace, but that’s no great comfort to Mr Angry of Beds.

Now that’s the sad consequence of the lack of control, moderation and rules which apply to the Internet and at the same time what makes it so blisteringly attractive - it’s a huge, chaotic, unprincipled world out there where only the strong survive, and it’s a no holds barred universe. You get the ups, you get the downs, but you also get a very marvellous New World where knowledge is a thing to be shared and spouted rather than squirreled away in your back room.

Of course, none of this is TOO relevant to the Deja.com service, wonderfully interesting though it may be, and it’s high time I got on with talking about the subject at hand. If, however, you want to hear more of the undoubtedly fascinating and absorbing dave27 all things to all people information session, why not write to alt.newsgroup.woefully.obscure.chat.on.the.matter.of.a.right.load.of.b***ocks.comp for the full run down….

Okay, Deja.com (I will continue to call it Deja.com, though it’s probably more correctly referred to as Google Groups these days) is a wonderful service that gives its members free access to the most comprehensive collection of Usenet Newsgroups you will find anywhere and provides some exceptionally good tools to make best use of them.

Once you go into the site you can click on one of the newsgroup prefixes (alt, biz, comp, etc) and find a relevant newsgroup that way or just key in the address. If you want to post to a group, Google will ask you to register an E-mail account to use as your username and you will have to specify a password, but then you're up and running, with full capability to use and abuse the entire western world. You can send the same message to multiple newsgroups, simply by separating each newsgroup address by a comma, so it’s easy to bombard all those innocents out there with your highly illegal and iffy spam, if that is your heart’s desire, but be careful, ABUSE WILL LEAD TO YOUR E-MAIL ACCOUNT BEING TERMINATED.

If you spend any time at all on newsgroups you’ll quickly become aware that they are constantly being bombarded by spam and unfeeling cads, preying upon their better nature. Many newsgroups eventually close down when the spam parade becomes too much. In the words of Snappy/Flashpointz: “I’m pink, therefore I spam…”

Google have pepped up the old Deja.com site and made it very user friendly and comprehensive and the service now represents a key part of their overall offering, making it exceptionally easy to take advantage of the whole newsgroup universe with all the thrills that entails and an instant passport to Geekdom.

Personally, I’m not a very active user of newsgroups in general, because something like Yahoo Groups gives a much more comprehensive and friendly service, but they do certainly have their place and even now my newsgroup, the aforementioned alt.newsgroup.woefully.obscure.chat.on.the.matter.of.a.right.load.of.b***ocks.comp is overflowing with lively interesting tales of the dave27 clan…

The Google site has access to an enormous archive of messages at the newsgroups. Google claims it “contains the entire archive of Usenet discussion groups dating back to 1995. These discussions cover the full range of human discourse and provide a fascinating look at evolving viewpoints, debate and advice on every subject from politics to technology. Google's search feature enables users to access this wealth of information with the speed and efficiency of a Google web search, providing relevant results from a database containing more than 600 million posts.” Ooh, what lovely people!

In fact Google’s search technology when combined with the newsgroup access gives you an enormously powerful tool to find all sorts of crap info on any imaginable subject and you can either search on all the hierarchies or restrict your search to one or more hierarchy. Now that’s what I call useful - you can blast all the way through the entire bloated crap that’s out there and come sharply down to the stuff you want. You even get an advanced search facility that can make things even more precise. Thankyou Google.

You can also request the addition of a new group, by sending “a message to groups-support@google.com that includes the name of the newsgroup you would like to have added to the archive. Your request will be reviewed, and if it's accepted, the newsgroup will be added within a few days. Each request is evaluated to determine the value of the information the newsgroup contains, but there are no guarantees that a given newsgroup will be added. Please do not send more than one request to add a particular newsgroup as this slows the evaluation process and does not affect the ultimate outcome.”

They also tell you how to report abuse, so you can have fun whacking all the naughty people who get on there and give you what for … shame all churners and abusers can’t be wiped out as easily.

To summarise, Google have taken what was already a pretty damn good service in Deja.com and integrated it superbly into their overall offering and are now even more of a MUST HAVE tool than ever before. They took a while to get the posting function up and running, but at least they didn’t release it until they knew it was robust and could be sustained.

What a refreshing change!

PS For those of you who have had a sarcasm bypass, there is no newsgroup called alt.newsgroup.woefully.obscure.chat.on.the.matter.of.a.right.load.of.b***ocks.comp AS FAR AS I AM AWARE, but there may be tomorrow…….

Goodnight,

dave27
 

...less