Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version VT1.00C 11/1/84; site vortex.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!ucbvax!decvax!bellcore!vortex!lauren From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) Newsgroups: net.news.group Subject: Re: Keyword based news Message-ID: <808@vortex.UUCP> Date: Sun, 22-Sep-85 22:17:07 EDT Article-I.D.: vortex.808 Posted: Sun Sep 22 22:17:07 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 24-Sep-85 03:21:19 EDT References: <1419@utcsri.UUCP> Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles Lines: 63 The issues of keyword-based news came up a couple of (years?) ago, and were pretty completely discussed at that time. I'll try find some of my old messages on the topic--I don't think I want to try generate them again from memory! The summary though, was that I felt (and feel) that keyword-based news won't work well in our environment. I had a number of objections at the time, including: 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. 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 of finding things of interest (in particular groups) regardless of how badly subject lines may have been chosen. The lack of newsgroups in a keyword-based system essentially is like putting TOTAL faith in the keywords (analogous to the subject line) for finding articles of interest (that is, there are no newsgroups to provide a higher level reference). 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...) 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... 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? Some people may think this is great--a way to force all sites to pass everything. Friends, all that will do is force many sites to stop passing anything at all. We're starting to see sites faced with the alternative of cutting off some of the junk groups or not being able to hire some new people to do real work. If we try to set things up so that sites can't easily control what netnews they're paying for, we're just asking many important sites to vanish. Some sites simply don't have the money, disk or CPU cycles to handle all groups. If you put them in a situation where they can't easily subscribe (or pass on) topic groups of particular interest, you're saying they can't participate at all. This "take it all or take nothing" aspect of keyword systems is one of its most negative aspects. Newsgroups provide an upper level of organization whose importance cannot be overemphasized, since they cause users to fit their postings into some established level of organization that isn't totally tied to users' own (arbitrary) keyword choices. More later... --Lauren--