Trapping Tags and Conversations - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 202

trapping conversations
Generally speaking there are three types of conversations you can track:

. Usenet. Usenet is a collection of thousands of newsgroups set up in a
hierarchy that's been available for over twenty years now. While not
as popular as it used to be, it still generates a lot of traic.

Mailing Lists. Discussion groups that are distributed to their mem-
bers mainly through e-mail. As more closed conversations are less
subject to the ravages of spamming and trolling, mailing lists have
become more popular over the last few years. And many of them have
publicly available archives that you can search without being on the
list, or without requiring more than a basic free registration.

.

Discussion Boards. Discussion boards are areas on Web sites that con-
tain discussions, usually on very speciic topics or groups of topics.

.

When it comes to monitoring Usenet, Google Groups is your best bet. But
for the other types of conversation trapping you have lots of options.

Google Groups
Google Groups (groups.google.com) is actually a combination of a mailing
list host and a Usenet search service, but the mailing lists have not caught up
with the still prodigious Usenet traic! So we concentrate on that option.

Your irst task when preparing to trap Usenet is to igure out where you're
going to trap. Most topics you want to monitor will be well served by limit-
ing the search to a newsgroup or a set of newsgroups.

Usenet's newsgroups are arranged in a hierarchy—major categories like
comp (computers), sci (science), rec (recreation), and so on. (here are a
bunch of little categories as well.) Underneath the major categories there
are subcategories, sub-subcategories (sometimes even more sub than that),
and newsgroups. You can search by single newsgroups but I ind it's easier
to search by category.

If you don't ind any major category that really covers what you're looking for,
then you've got a couple of options. You can do a full Usenet search (if your
search is speciic enough this shouldn't be a big deal) or you can try to ind
individual groups that cover what you're looking for. Searching for individual
groups also shows you mailing lists that Google Groups is hosting.