What is Usenet, Anyway?
One of the most astounding facts about Usenet is that it isn’t part of any organization, or has any sort of centralized network management authority. In fact, it’s part of Usenet lore that except for a technical description, you cannot define what it is, you can only say what it isn’t. If you have Brendan Kehoe’s excellent “Zen and the Art of the Internet” (available online or through Prentice-Hall, see []) at hand, you will find an amusing list of Usenet’s non-properties. At the risk of sounding stupid, one might define Usenet as a collaboration of separate sites who exchange Usenet news. To be a Usenet site, all you have to do is find another site Usenet site, and strike an agreement with its owners and maintainers to exchange news with you. Providing another site with news is also called feeding it, whence another common axiom of Usenet philosophy originates: “Get a feed and you’re on it.” The basic unit of Usenet news is the article. This is a message a user writes and “posts’
