Microsoft to
do for Usenet what it did for Email & The Web?
Netscan is
an interesting NNTP based project and it is pretty much along the
same lines of what Virtuoso has
provided (albeit with an inferior UI) for NNTP since 1999.
Using Virtuoso the data presented by Netscan could very easily
be presented as XML which could then be further processed using
XPath, XQuery, and XSL-T with the final result RDF (since this is
metadata afterall - another contribution to the Semantic Web)