Usenet

This is a world-wide bulletin board. Thousands of news-servers around the world exchange batches of messages so that a message posted to one server will, over the course of time, perhaps a few days, appear on every server around the world. Well almost, not all servers will accept all news-groups - for example, the messages recently highlighted in the press have not been accepted by the Oxford University news server for a long time.

There are two newsgroups of immediate genealogical interest -

soc.genealogy.britain
soc.genealogy.ireland

You might also like to look through -

soc.genealogy.surnames.britain
soc.genealogy.surnames.ireland
Although neither are really as useful as they look. A better alternative will be along shortly.

Here are some others that might be of use:

soc.genealogy.computing
soc.genealogy.methods
soc.genealogy.marketplace
soc.genealogy.misc
alt.genealogy
uk.media.radio.archers

And then there is the World Wide Web