Earlier this week, I was thinking that newsgroups had really gone down the crapper. One out of every two messages in alt.design.product was either an ad for an alternative to viagra or spam from a porno site.

As you can probably imagine, I didn’t expect much when I posted to the group asking about universities offering new product development programs. But, lo and behold, a few days after I uploaded the request, a kind person e-mailed me with a link to a cool program that’s right in my own back yard (practically). The link was to the Product Design Program at Stanford.

As a result, my faith in newsgroups was temporarily restored – right after I wrote a rule to automatically delete all posts with the word “viagra” in the subject.