Usenet is a whole 'nother protocol
like http (for the web), smtp/pop (for mail), etc. It's called nntp (network news transport protocol). Basically, it's an online bulletin board system somewhat similar to email, except that instead of being one-to-one like email is, it's one-to-many: when you post to usenet, anyone in the world can read what you've written, and reply to it. Discussions are threaded (which means that you can see the 'thread' of the conversation as in 'who replied to whom') and for the most part there is NO moderation of any kind.
To find a web interface to usenet: [link|http://groups.google.com|http://groups.google.com].
Here's a link that will point your news reader (if you have any installed... outlook will work but is a crappy news reader) to a server I know you can read (I know it because I run it... but while anyone can read from my server you have to get a userid/password to be able to post to it):
nntp://news.consultron.ca (you'll have to cut'n'paste these into your browser: Scott, for some reason the forum software doesn't recognise the nttp protocol properly).
My news server has some usenet groups (that is, groups that are propagated worldwide), some local groups (groups that only exist on my server), and some private groups from various other news servers. The unifying theme of my server is OS/2 and programming. Here's a couple of groups:
nntp://news.consultron.ca/comp.os.os2.advocacy - pretty bad
nntp://news.consultron.ca/comp.lang.c - can be bad, devoted to the C programming language.
nntp://news.consultron.ca/ecomstation.misc - pretty polite, devoted to the eComStation distribution of OS/2 Warp.
In the worldwide usenet feed, there are tens of thousands of groups, ranging from the saccharine (alt.fan.barney), to the technical (comp.lang.* - groups devoted to programming languages), to the musical (alt.binaries.mp3.*) to the obscene (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica), to the downright morbid and grotesque (alt.fan.karla.homolka). Usenet is read daily by millions and is accessible to billions of people, because it's well suited to low bandwidth environments, such as may be found in many third world countries (where that flash animation that loads in seconds in north america may take half an hour or even half a day to download).
It's an interesting place, and well worth checking out... if you really want to know what the average man-in-the-street-in-Islamabad thinks, usenet is the place to find out... it's just a matter of finding the right newsgroup so you can engage them in conversation.
There is a LOT more to the Internet than just email and the web.
