Xref: utzoo news.sysadmin:795 news.misc:1605 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!pasteur!ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU!fair From: fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,news.misc Subject: Netnews, USENET's composition, and "real" newswires Message-ID: <4274@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> Date: 6 Jul 88 07:28:59 GMT References: <465@nbc1.UUCP> <8898@netsys.UUCP> <4242@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> <466@nbc1.UUCP> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu Organization: USENET Protocol Police, Western Gateway Division Lines: 71 In the referenced article, stone@nbc1.UUCP (Anthony Stone) writes: [most journalists are already too overloaded with stuff to read, and USENET would simply make that worse] I used to work at a television station in Austin, KVUE, which is still on the net and some of its news producers read the net occasionally and have even gotten story ideas from it. But I think Usenet is still predominately technical enough that it more of a sociological curiosity than a source of news to general interest journalists. Ah, yes! I remember you. KVUE was one of Dual Systems' customers from long ago. Good to see you're still on the net. Actually, the traffic in numbers of messages (not bytes) is pretty evenly split between the "rec" category and the "comp" category; if you're taking "inet", comp is on top, and if not, rec is on top. In this sense, the network has lost its strictly technical focus (lost it in early 1986), although I concede that it is still primarily technical people talking about non-technical subjects. Of course, technically educated people are ideal for generating truly insightful and enlightened debate on the topics of the day, right? :-) On the other hand, USENET's value to any journalist covering (or pretending to cover) the computer industry is obvious. To the extent that we can get such journalists on-line and (with luck) better educated by the professionals in the field so they don't make quite so many boneheaded mistakes when they write their articles, having journalists on the USENET is a good thing. Watching the press explain the current rash of viruses has been most interesting (or horrifying, if your mind works that way), particularly in that they've pretty consistently confused viruses with trojan horses, logic bombs, and a whole host of other, tangentially-related computer security risks. This isn't the only example of the press screwing up the reporting of events in the computer industry, either. On a slightly related topic (particularly related to the information overload problem that Anthony alluded to) I wonder: has anyone ever tried to gateway a real newswire service (e.g. AP/NYT, UPI, Reuters, etc.) into netnews for their own local use? (I realize that newswire contracts are most specific about prohibitions on further redistribution of the material that they provide without explicit permission). I had a look about a year ago at UPI's extended ANPA standard (just a quick technical overview, no real details) and it seemed to me that they had analogues of newsgroups, message-IDs, even an equivalent of a "cancel" control message (or a Supersedes: header), and that the job of gatewaying would be pretty easy. Netnews even has a time-based expire to get rid of old articles before your disk fills up with yesterday's news. Our user interfaces have a somewhat problematic paradigm though: they all want to show you everything new in a category, and given the amount of traffic that a newswire represents, stronger filters would be needed. How would you structure and then filter netnews if there were an order of magnitude (10x) more of it? One more thought: anyone interested in organizing a wire service (volunteer or otherwise) for USENET? That is, when any of you go to an event that might be of national (or international) interest, why not write it up, and post your article to the net? Be liberal in your interpretation of "what might be of interest" too - you never know what the estimated 224,000 USENET readers might be interested in, and who knows? We might be able to paint a more accurate picture of what's going on around us than the traditional media do now... Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu