Green Usenet Archives

What is Usenet and what does Green have to do with it?

We have begun to data-mine a gigantic data set of the public Usenet. Our crawler looked for keywords related to Green, Eco-Friendly and Environment; especially looking for anything related to home building and construction.

It’s unmoderated, unfiltered and most of the time completely off topic. We are posting this data for those researching eco related topics and perhaps the discussions can influence, inspire or spark ideas. All emails and URL’s have been removed from the data to protect people’s identities.

We have gigs of data to sort through and hope to roll out updates daily over the next month.

Explore our Categories

• Environmental Posts

• Ecological Posts

• Environmental Protection Agency related Posts

• Freecycle Posts

• Global Warming Posts

• Hybrid Cars Posts

• Live Earth Posts

• Pollution Posts

• Recycling Posts

• Solar Energy Posts

• Sustainability Posts

A Brief History of Usenet

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today.

Usenet can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between email and web forums. Discussions are threaded, with modern news reader software, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.

One notable difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another in so-called news feeds. Individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server operated by their Internet service provider, university, or employer.