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Path: utzoo!utcsri!mason
From: mason@utcsri.UUCP (Dave Mason)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: Keyword based news
Message-ID: <1429@utcsri.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Sep-85 09:58:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsri.1429
Posted: Tue Sep 24 09:58:12 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 24-Sep-85 10:17:02 EDT
References: <1419@utcsri.UUCP> <808@vortex.UUCP>
Reply-To: mason@utcsri.UUCP (Dave mason)
Organization: University of Toronto/Ryerson Polytechnic Institute
Lines: 53
Summary: 

In article <808@vortex.UUCP> lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) writes:
>...
>1) People don't even (much of the time) keep simple subject lines initially 
>   relevant nor up-to-date on followups.  I have little faith that
>   we'll see better results with keywords, the selection of which
>   is very critical (see below).  Research in database systems has indicated
>   that poor user choices of keywords is one of the biggest problems
>   in making keyword systems useful.
I agree whole-heartedly.

>2) Inappropriate use of keyword-based systems can make life very difficult
>   for people who find they are missing useful articles since the original
>   keywords were badly chosen.  At least with newsgroups there's a chance
>...
>   People often just don't take the time and effort to choose appropriate
>   keywords, and the situation could get very ugly with followups as the
>   topics drift but the keywords tend to remain the same (through laziness
>   or whatever...)
I proposed that the original keywords would NOT be propagated, and each
successive poster would choose the appropriate keywords.  There presumably
would be a way to track articles that were follow-ups to ones you found of
interest, but the original choice of keywords would not affect the followup.

>3) Keyword-based systems may encourage vast increases in the volume of
>   postings.  Right now we only tend to find high volume in established
>   topic newsgroups, but with a keyword-based system my gut feeling is that
>   people would feel much more free to post anything and everything anytime
>   they wanted.  This could clearly accelerate many of the problems that
>   we've already been seeing as topics splinter off in all directions and
>   volume balloons.  This is made even worse since...
Maybe..but I'm not convinced.

>4) ... it will be very difficult for systems to control the types of
>   material they are willing to pass on in a keyword-based system.
>   With newsgroups, a site can at least consider dropping some of the
>   "junk" groups if they have to/want to, but how do you make such
>   decisions with a keyword system?
I proposed a method, and although I'm not claiming it is fool-proof, I
would find it more useful if it were critiqued rather than ignored.
I was talking about trans-oceanic links, but the same would hold for
any site that didn't want to accept some classes of articles.

The only argument I can see against the approach (limiting articles
based on keywords) is the use of trojan horse words:  keyword mvs-xa
meaning aberrant-sex-with-children (there are those who would lump the
two topics together anyway :-) , but I can't see this being much worse
than the current news-group situation.
-- 
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	!utcsri!mason		Dave Mason, U. Toronto CSRI
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