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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--