The role of Usenet in opinion sharing is not as important as it used to be. Wikipedia’s definition of social media doesn’t even include this medium and I guess that most of today’s Internet users don’t know the term at all.
Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of traffic in Usenet, for example in such groups as pl.misc.telefonia.gsm (Polish newsgroup on GSM telephony) where people infinitely discuss pros and cons of various GSM operators and telephones. Therefore it might be worth considering to monitor selected newsgroups to keep current on product opinions, to protect brand name etc. As Google archives all Usenet postings ever written and makes them searchable, a casual Usenet posting might turn out to be more important than a professional portal article that gets deleted after a week or two.
Two simple methods of Usenet monitoring are Google Alerts and filtered RSS feeds. Google Alerts are straightforward: you just define an alert by providing a search string and e-mail address, then you receive notifications via e-mail. The drawback is that you need to define folders and rules in your e-mail reader to have the information under control. On the other hand, they enable you to search all articles, threads and groups - this is not possible with the RSS method.
The RSS example will assume that a popular and free Feedreader is used, but a similar technique applies to e.g. FeedDemon. In order to monitor the newsgroup comp.sys.laptops for the word Sony, first define the feed corresponding to it. You do so by adding the following addresses to the reader:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.laptops/feed/topics.xml?num=100
Then create a new feed that contains filtered articles from the above feed. In case of Feedreader such filtered feed is called smartfeed (in FeedDemon, use watch to achieve the same result). Create a new smartfeed named Sony on Usenet and define it as the following:
- [Match all of the following rules]
- [Title] [contains] [Sony]
- [Feed name] [is one of the following] [comp.sys.laptops Google Group]
Also, go to Tools / Options and check Open article link automatically. Now, as soon as a new article with the word Sony appears in the newsgroup, it will be displayed inside the smartfeed Sony on Usenet. When you click on the article title the entire thread will be displayed.
The limitation of the RSS approach is that monitored keywords need to appear in the subject or in the beginning part of the first article of a thread. Moreover, it’s not possible to search the entire Usenet. On the other hand, the solution is easier to manage compared to e-mail alerts.