I'm really surprised at how many people don't know about usenet. You guys have no idea of what you are missing out on. It's basically the biggest bulletin board there is. Depending on the provider, you can get access to tens of thousands of groups. My provider currently lists over 31,000 different groups.

The "Big 8" are the main top hierarchies of the system. From the wikipedia article on usenet,

The major set of worldwide newsgroups is contained within nine hierarchies,
eight of which are operated under consensual guidelines that govern their
administration and naming. The current "Big Eight" are:

* comp.*: computer-related discussions (comp.software, comp.sys.amiga)
* misc.*: Miscellaneous topics (misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids)
* news.*: Discussions and announcements about news (meaning Usenet, not current events) (news.groups, news.admin)
* rec.*: Recreation and entertainment (rec.music, rec.arts.movies)
* sci.*: Science related discussions (sci.psychology, sci.research)
* soc.*: Social discussions (soc.college.org, soc.culture.african)
* talk.*: Talk about various controversial topics (talk.religion, talk.politics)
* humanities.*: Fine arts, literature, and philosophy (humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc)

The other big top level is the alt.* tree, of which alt.earthquake.predictions is a part.

To be a little more clear, usenet is it's own thing. See, the 'internet' is just the networking system that physically connects the computers.

Usenet uses the internet to do the communicating using a protocol called NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol).

The World Wide Web ("WWW") also uses the internet to do it's thing, using yet different protocols (too many to list here).

Then there's IRC, Internet Relay Chat, which also just uses the internet to do it's thing.

In fact, email is yet another protocol that uses the internet. This one is called SMTP for "Simple Mail Transport Protocol".

All these things I just mentioned - NNTP, WWW, IRC, SMTP - are just different protocols (methods of transferring data) used over the internet to do various things.

Many people mistakenly equate "the Web" with "the Internet". The web sits on top of the internet.

To use an analogy, the streets of our cities are like the internet, interconnecting places and providing a means to move form one location to another. Buses are one method of using the streets, cars another, trucks yet another, motorcycles yet again another. They all use the same streets but each is designed to do something different. In the same way, Usenet, email, and the Web are all things that use the same internet but are designed to do different things.

Brian