Usenet Condiments
NewsAdmin Staff Writer

Few things compare to eating a perfectly cooked hot dog, but without the proper condiments, the magic of the moment quickly fades. A festive chili, a bold sauerkraut, a zesty deli mustard or perhaps all three... individually these tasty accessories are nothing special, but in combination they allow the hot dog to reach its full flavorocity and potential.

In the world of Usenet, there are some providers that offer the equivalent of a hot dog & bun... NNTP newsgroup access, nothing more nothing less. These services are fine for what they are, but they may lack enough relish to leave a memorable impression with end users. In contrast, other providers offer an entire condiment bar that may help to maximize the Usenet experience, and even open eyes to a new way of ingesting your daily serving of newsgroup content.

A few providers offer email boxes with their newsgroup accounts. Initially you wouldn't think these items should appear on the same plate, but the more we played with the pairing the more it made sense. When posting to the newsgroups you may like to receive feedback via email, but aren't excited about sharing a personal address in the groups where it may be harvested by spammers. A NSP provided email box allows you to keep your newsgroup correspondence separate from your personal email boxes and they're usually more reliable than the freebie accounts you might find at a Yahoo or Hotmail.

Another nifty side dish if you can find one, is a search feature. We've only found a couple of providers that offer a search engine in some shape or form, and in our experience they can be a huge time saver. Lets say you're looking for an audio clip of Captain & Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together", and you're left with three options... A) You can spend the next week sifting aimlessly through 1000's of MP3 newsgroups B) You can endure the humiliation of asking someone to post a Captain & Tennille song to a particular group C) You can type the phrase into a newsgroup search engine and quickly locate any posts that matches your search request. Considering that most news servers carry 50,000+ groups and receive millions of new posts per day, a search engine can be very convenient when it comes to retrieving content of interest and minimizing your online time.

Web based newsgroup access also caught our attention. I'm sure the mere mention of this has some Usenet purists shouting profanities at their computer screens, but hear us out. We enjoy using NNTP newsreaders like the next guy, but there are some undeniable benefits to accessing the newsgroups with a Web interface that shouldn't be dismissed.

Most computers come with a preinstalled Web browser, so if your NSP offers a Web interface, you can park yourself in front of any computer... home, work, school, etc... and access the newsgroups without having to download a NNTP reader at each of those locations. When it comes to multimedia posts these web interfaces typically do all of the heavy lifting... thumbnailing, automatic decoding, bulk downloading, etc... and are not as manual & cumbersome to use as a traditional NNTP reader. Last but not least Web interfaces will usually download the smaller decoded version of a newsgroup file, as opposed to a NNTP reader which will transfer the same file in a much larger encoded format... in some cases almost 30% larger. With this arrangement you'll be able to reduce your download times, and if you receive metered service through a NSP, you'll be able to get the most out of the download capacity allocated to your account.

Several NSPs have put a lot of work into tweeking their accounts so that they offer more than just a generic NNTP newsgroup connection, so nowadays there's no reason why you have to walk around with a plain hot dog & bun. NSPs can vary considerably with the account extras they do and don't provide, so it's always worthwhile to compare those differences and select the arrangement that best suits your requirements or discover a requirement you may not have initially thought you had.

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