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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