Internet newsgroups have become a bit of a joke lately, since most of them are filled with spam advertisements for Viagra and adult Web sites. Internet newsgroups, however, can still be great places to find specific information, especially when it comes to connecting with other fans about a particular celebrity, finding information about them, and learning how to contact them.

Newsgroups (also called Usenet) is a part of the Internet in which groups are created for every conceivable niche, and people who access those groups can read messages posted by other people or post their own in order to discuss a particular topic. These groups can be very eclectic, ranging from people who like to photograph horses to people who like midget gymnastics, plus everything in between. Therefore, you’ll have no trouble finding fans of a specific celebrity where you can discuss and gossip about them as long as you want 

Subscribing to a newsgroup is easy once you know how. There’s no cost involved, and your browser software can probably handle the job without needing any extra downloads or installations, although there are programs that can make organizing the information you find in newsgroups much easier. These are called "news readers" or "newsgroup readers", and can be found with a simple search on Google for links to some free downloads. If you want to read the messages and search them for specific information, this Google Newsgroup section (http://groups.google.com) is by far the best way to go:

Simply enter a search string in the box provided and click "search." In fact, when we do this with the "Julianne Moore contact details" phrase from before, we find a newsgroup newsletter posting, listing her contact address alongside every other celebrity from the film Far from Heaven, which was released in November 2002.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of posts on Usenet, but what makes the Google service special is that they have every newsgroup post in their system, all the way back to 1994. Most people don’t need to download all those billions of postings from the last 12 years, but that’s exactly what Google has done for you.

If you do decide to access a newsgroup, whether it’s with a software program or an online service like Google, do not put your email address in the post in an easy-to-read way. If you do, your address will most likely be spammed within days of its first appearance on the newsgroup. Instead, put something like "info at contactanycelebrity dot com" or "info@nospamplease.contactanycelebrity.com" instead. When spammers send their scanners, or spiders, out to automatically harvest email addresses, yours won’t register correctly in their database. Anyone who wants to legitimately contact you, however, can do so.

Speaking of spam, it has infiltrated most newsgroups. What you want to look for are "moderated" forums, where a moderator approves every message posted to the newsgroup. That keeps spammers away (for the most part at least). Once you start navigating the various groups, you’ll figure out which ones are moderated and which ones are basically a pointless collection of spam.

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