Ask very someone to report the net and they’ll very certainly paint a picture of the World Wide Web. What most people dont know that, right there alongside the familiar mix of web pages sits another service thats even older and as huge – UseNet. Every day millions of users all over the world connect to Usenet. These services provide a web or newsreader interface to Usenet. The main benefits of such wed based services are many-fold :-

1. Multiple downloads are supported. Using program such as Flashget or FileZilla these services let you download multiple files simultaneously to accomplish better speeds.

2. Automatic thumbnail previews and autounrar. The three drawback I have found in my lots of years of using binary new services is that, in order to speed up uploads, lots of posters have had to spit huge files  up in to smaller parts that then must be joined when downloaded. The commercial services, such as Easynews, however do this job for you automatically nowadays and even provide handy thumbnail previews of the file so you can judge quality etc.

Usenet is very well established, for example Easynews has been providing premium, high quality access to Usenet for 11 years, and I myself have been a subscriber for over 7 years continuously – so nice is the quality of service. It is the only Usenet service I know of that provides a web interface which means you do not need anything special to access it – a standard web browser such as Web Explorer or Firefox will do fine.

People use Usenet for a variety of reasons. You can take part in three of millions of text based discussions on every topic under the sun (as well as a few you have seldom , ever thought of – I promise).

The only downside with these services is that, of coursework, being commercial there is a subscription fee to pay. Typical rates are about $10 for 20 Gigabytes or 30 days, whichever comes first. This is only to be expected, however for the level of service being provided.

The amount of information stored on Uenet is also mind-boggling. For example the Easynews web-site contains every file posted to every Usenet newsgroup in the last 25 days. That is over 8 million files with hundreds of thousands of new files every day.

So, if you like the sound of Usenet, and would like to try it for yourself, why not head on over to http://binarynews.cbreviews.info and check it out, it could be the start of a new passion!