Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.UUCP Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: keyword-based news Message-ID: <833@looking.UUCP> Date: Mon, 6-Jul-87 22:58:59 EDT Article-I.D.: looking.833 Posted: Mon Jul 6 22:58:59 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 8-Jul-87 06:37:26 EDT References: <266@brandx.rutgers.edu> <8262@utzoo.UUCP> Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 62 In article <8262@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes: >Well, there were reasons for that. I and some others were counter-arguing >fairly strenuously that keyword-based news readers will not work unless the >keywords are well-chosen, which they wouldn't be. The successful keyword- >based retrieval services maintain tight central control over their keyword >list and often use experts to assign keywords to new material. There is >just no way to make that work on Usenet. > >Mars must wait -- we have Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology My original proposal of K news (must be almost 5 years ago now!) did suggest user generated keywords. That idea comes from a smaller net, and Henry has a point that it might not work well now. What if we take the other features of K news but require some central authority (a "moderator?") for the creation of keywords. Right now there are two reasons to NOT create a newsgroup: 1) The news software did not envision so many groups, so there are hard memory limits on many machines on the number of groups in the active file 2) The net might get too confusing with too many groups 3) People aren't interested enough in the idea to warrant spending money sending the stuff all over the world (Note that "volume would be too low" is not a reason at all. In fact, it's an anti-reason. The lower the volume in a group the better. Today's high-volume groups are useless to most people. They just don't have time to wade through them.) K news was designed to get rid of reason #1. With good reason, for the high volume groups that are the result of reason #1 cost everybody a lot of money, and waste a lot of time for the people who read them. Reason #2 can't be solved well with software. It is a trade-off we must pay. The more specific news classification is, the harder it is to comprehend it all. The less specific it is, the noisier groups get with random postings and other crap. You don't want a net with only one group called "misc" and you don't want 20,000 groups either. Reason #3 was solved by the use of K news's powerful subscription file as a distribution file. Allowing convenient site subscription, minor keywords could be set up to limit distribution to only those sites with readers. This would make distribution MORE efficient than a mailing list. ------------- So other than the S.M.O.P. involved, why not K news? It solved (5 years ago) just about every major problem we have today. Because of the lack of software restrictions, the keyword creation moderators would not have to be particularly controversial. Instead of asking "why create this group?" the question would be "why not?" Keyword moderators would most ensure that keywords followed a good pattern, and that keyword association dictionaries were kept up to date. (Most people on this list have seen the K news plan, so I won't post it unless I get a lot of requests.) -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473