Page 19 - CA 165 ver 1.0 Class 10
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Genre Blogs
Genre blogs are meant for the publication of articles on specific topics or a particular subject, such as
Political blogs, Travel blogs, House blogs, Fashion blogs, Educational blogs, etc.
Spam Blogs
Spam blogs are used for the sole purpose of spamming. Spam blogs are usually a type of scrapper site in
which the contents are either unauthentic text or merely stolen or copied from other websites.
Such blogs usually contain a large number of links to sites associated with the blog which are often
disreputable or useless websites.
Notes
Moblog: Sometimes blogs may also be distinguished based on the input devices being used for
uploads. A blog written/updated through a mobile device like a mobile phone or PDA (Personal Digital
Assistant) can be called a moblog.
Newsgroup
A newsgroup refers to a forum on the Internet where people share ideas about topics of mutual interest.
The topics of interest may be from areas like politics, technology, sports, etc. Newsgroups, which are
also referred to as ‘Usenet’, are international discussion groups that focus on some topics and help in
gathering information from the Internet.
The information or articles that make up the ‘news’ are written by people interested in a specific topic.
Such articles are posted to the newsgroup so that others can read, reply or comment on them.
Most newsgroups exist on the network of ‘Usenet’ which contains thousands of newsgroups. NNTP
(Network News Transfer Protocol) servers manage the network of Newsgroups.
Each ‘Usenet’ is run by a server system called a ‘News Server’. The one who manages the system is called
the news administrator. Any client can send a news article to the news administrator which is kept for a
period of two days to two weeks. The news server regularly checks the articles and deletes the old ones.
Newsgroups can be broadly categorized into two types: moderated and unmoderated. A moderated
newsgroup will not allow individuals to post messages directly to the newsgroup while an unmoderated
newsgroup will allow members to post a message directly to a newsgroup for other members to read and
respond. There is no need to subscribe any particular newsgroup.
Some terms that are used in ‘Newsgroup’ are:
Thread: It refers to a series of articles on the same subject.
Post: Message in a newsgroup is called an article or a post, though normally we refer to them as news
or message.
Lurking: It means hanging around a newsgroup (especially if there is a new member of the group) to
see what is being discussed.
Flaming: It refers to sending nasty messages to people in the group.
Poster: It refers to the person who posts articles to the group.
The table shows some categories of ‘Newsgroup’ and their topics:
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