Following Netscape’s lead, other high-tech companies began hosting site-specific newsgroups. One of these was BYTE, where I launched a news server that enabled BYTE’s widely dispersed staff to meet and converse with its even more widely dispersed readership. That server, which was the standard InterNet News (INN) 1.4 included with my Caldera Linux kit (see the following tip), immediately paid us a huge dividend. I was planning a cover story for the magazine, a process that for me typically involved weeks of telephone interviews with vendors and users whose perspectives would shape the story. The real challenge had always been simply to find the right people to interview. This is a classic networking problem, in the social sense of networking. We use the people we do know to find the people we don’t know. But isn’t the Internet the ultimate power tool for social networking? To test that proposition, I started a thread in one of my newsgroups, outlining my plan for the cover story and inviting discussion of it. Then I advertised the thread on our home page.
Note
Setting up your own news server is a lot like setting up a web server—install the software, configure some settings, create a directory structure, and turn it on. See Chapter 13, for details on doing this with various kinds of NNTP servers, on both Linux and NT.
The latest servers from Microsoft and Netscape come with GUI administration tools that turn most of this stuff into a point-and-click exercise. Why don’t more people know this? Traditionally, news servers have been used solely as Usenet nodes, and setting up the server-to-server newsfeeds was a complex and arcane chore. When you run a site-specific NNTP server that doesn’t replicate with the Usenet, though, you eliminate almost all the hard stuff. The rest is, as I’ve said, no more difficult than setting up a web server.
In the discussion that ensued, a NASA software engineer mentioned his work using Java to distribute data visualization across an intranet. This was exactly the sort of real-world example that the story required. We conversed online, then by telephone, and what I learned became the centerpiece of the story. What’s most remarkable is that my traditional research method never would have found this person, but with the help of Internet groupware, he found me. It was a transforming experience for a journalist, and I think the focus-group technique can apply in other fields as well. The purpose of a corporate web site is not to entertain your customers and business partners but to engage them. Newsgroups or other forms of Internet-based discussion, properly deployed, will help you do that.