Tag Info

If I understand your question, you want to read news such as Usenet News. One way to do that is to install software on your PC that directly connects to a NNTP server. There's a long list of such software at Wikipedia: "List of Usenet newsreaders" and Wikipedia: "Comparison of Usenet newsreaders".

I know that Marc Smith did research into analyzing and visualizing newsgroup activity while he was at Microsoft Research. I don't think it was a webapp, but it was called "Newsgroup Clouds". I have no idea how he gathered the data for analysis -- if he was subscribing to the feeds over time, or if he could analyze a new newsgroup on demand.