GIS Discussion & Usenet Groups

Remember back in the day when Usenet and its newsgroups were the happening thing? Discussions on every topic conceivable... Many of those old groups still exist, depending on which server you use, but the exchange of text postings has largely moved to web forums. These days, the primary use of Usenet servers are to exchange those good ol' alt.binaries.

Well, few years back Google went and bought out the Usenet archives from Deja, and have combined the Usenet newsgroups with their Google Groups**. We also have Yahoo! Groups, which as far as I know bears no relation to the original Usenet.

Here are the GIS-related Usenet, Google Groups, and Yahoo! Groups that I monitor. Monitoring is actually quite easy as Google and Yahoo! provide RSS for open/public groups (those not requiring registration). Mind you, this is not even close to a comprehensive list...Only those I monitor.

Usenet Groups
• comp.infosystems.gis [feed]
• comp.soft-sys.gis.esri [feed]
• sci.geo.cartography [feed]

Google Groups
• ArcGIS Google Group [feed]
• ESRI Google Group [feed]
• GIS Educators Google Group [feed]
• Google Maps API Google Group [feed]
• Professional GIS / GPS Developers Google Group [feed]

Yahoo! Groups
• gisindia at Yahoo! Groups [feed]
• new_ai_geostats at Yahoo! Groups [feed]

** On a side note, I sure remember Google's acquisition of the Deja archives well. Was working for a dot com company in Austin, TX during the dot com bust of 2000. Our company managed to stay afloat longer than most, and every day the higher-ups would tell us that we would all be OK because of this big deal that was about to go through. What big deal? Well, our company was on the verge on buying the Usenet archives from Deja. All but signed on the dotted line I was told. Then Google swooped in and snatched those archives right up. Less than 1 week later we were all of us at home wondering if we would ever fiend a job again. Well, I sure did...moved way down to Laredo, TX where I was introduced to GIS for the first time. Tsaal gud in the end, eh?