I’ve waxed enthusiastic about usenet here over the years, without too much success as far as I can tell. Most folks remain largely unaware of how useful it is. Google has just made some changes to their web interface into usenet that may help in terms of raising public awareness. Basically they seem to have stolen a page from Yahoo’s Groups function – the interface is similar. Subscribe to a group, you can post to it freely, and it keeps track of what you’ve seen and not seen. The difference is google is tying directly into usenet whereas with Yahoo they’re using their own (unfortunately ad heavy) system. It would be awesome if Google would stitch in some improvements, especially RSS feeds (I wish anyone would do this, I’ve craved it for ages) and ‘watches’ similar to what I can do in feeddemon – what I mean by this is…for example, imagine I am subscribed to comp.sys.lang.perl and I have a watch on ‘libxml’ – the system would alert me to any posts that come through mentioning libxml. On the surface this doesn’t seem hard to do, and as you can imagine it’s enormously useful in terms of reducing the amount of chaff you have to sort through to get to the wheat. But anyway, regardless of my own needs, google’s just made it easier for anyone to play around with usenet and get a feel for how useful it is. Check it out.