Around the Virtual Town Pump

Posted by arlene

Typing or talking to one person is fun and interesting, but for really good gossip, you need more than two people. Fortunately, the Internet offers limitless opportunities to find like-minded people and discuss anything you can imagine. Clubs, churches, and other groups use the Internet to hold meetings. Hobbyists and fans talk about an amazing variety of topics, from knitting to American Idol and everything in between. People with medical problems support each other and exchange tips. You get the idea — anything that people might want to talk about is currently under intense discussion somewhere on the Net.

You can talk with groups of people on the Internet in lots of ways, including these:

1. E-mail mailing lists, in which you exchange messages via e-mail
2. Web-based message boards, where messages appear on a Web page
3. Usenet newsgroups (the original Internet discussions groups), which you read with a news-reading program

This section tells you how to participate in Internet-based discussions using e-mail mailing lists and Web message boards.

For the full story on Internet-based communities, get our book, Poor Richard’s Building Online Communities, published by Top Floor Publishing.

MSN Groups, at groups.msn.com

MSN Groups include message boards, live chat rooms, and other information. You can browse lists of groups by topic, or search for groups with a particular word or phrase in its name. To join a group, you need to sign up for a free .NET Passport.

Yahoo Groups, at groups.yahoo.com

Yahoo Groups include message boards and file libraries, and you can read the messages either on the Web site or by e-mail — your choice when you join a group. Yahoo Groups also feature calendars for group events and real-time chats right on the Web site. To join, you must first sign up for a free Yahoo ID, which also gets you a mailbox and free Web space — what a deal! You can also create your own Yahoo Group by clicking links — either a public group for all to join or a private group for your club or family.

Subscribing and participating

To subscribe to a community on one of these Web sites, just follow the instructions on the site. Some community Web sites let you read the messages posted to their lists without actually subscribing — you can click links to display the messages in your Web browser.

Finding interesting online communities

Tens of thousands of communities — in the form of mailing lists, message boards, and hybrids of the two — reside on the Internet, but there’s no central directory of them. This is partly because so many lists are intended only for specific groups of people, like members of the Board of Directors of the First Parish Church of Podunk or students in Economics 101 at Tech State.

You can find some communities by searching the Web and including the word or phrase, mailing list, community, forum, or message board.

Online chat lets you communicate with other people who are at their computers and connected to the Internet by typing messages back and forth to each other. Chat may seem like just a version of instant messaging, but it is really a very different experience. Unlike e-mail or IM, chat often takes place among groups of strangers in chat rooms. Though kids sometimes use chat to talk to friends from school, one important aspect of chat is the ability to converse with someone new and maybe interesting, any time you feel like it.

Chat has led to marriages and divorces, to new friendships and occasionally to ugly incidents that make lurid headlines in the tabloid newspapers. Does chat sound intriguing? We’ll tell you how it works — and suggest some tips to help you avoid trouble.

You can set up your own mailing lists or message boards, too. It’s free because the sites display ads on their Web pages, and may even tack ads onto the postings on the list. If you have an unusual hobby, job, interest, or ailment, you may want to create a list to discuss it. Or set up a list for a committee or family group to use for online discussions.

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