Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site utcsri.UUCP 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. -- Usenet: {dalcs dciem garfield musocs qucis sask titan trigraph ubc-vision utzoo watmath allegra cornell decvax decwrl ihnp4 uw-beaver} !utcsri!mason Dave Mason, U. Toronto CSRI CSNET: mason@Toronto ARPA: mason%Toronto@CSNet-Relay