Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!wang!fitz
From: fitz@wang.UUCP (Tom Fitzgerald ms 019 890)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re^2: In Moderation
Message-ID: <383@wang.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jul 89 22:43:28 GMT
References: <24A91A67.28396@ateng.com> <3300@epimass.EPI.COM> <197600001@inmet> <14403@bfmny0.UUCP> <3749@viscous.sco.COM> <29-Jun-89.175917@192.41.214.248> <24AF7C38.8967@ateng.com>
Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA
Lines: 57

>According to kdb@InterCon.uu.net (Kurt Baumann):
>>                           ...  They are making money from sorting through
>> the articles and then sending those that they found to have some content
>> on to their subscribers.  Strickly speaking they do not make money off of
>> your articles, but rather from the screening service.

chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) responds:
> The profit isn't so bad (compare uunet and portal), but the redistribution
> restrictions are a basic alteration of the character of Usenet.  The act of
> posting on Usenet grants redistribution rights to recipients.

I'm beginning to think that IMN is selling the wrong thing.  I don't want
to pay somebody to withhold articles from me that they think I'm not
interested in seeing.  But I would pay somebody to give me accurate
descriptions of articles that my newsreader could chew through to decide
whether I want to see it.

So, IMN, how about assigning your corps of crack moderators to giving
articles good, usable, machine-readable keywords instead of just giving
them a thumbs-up/thumbs down?  Articles in news.groups could be keyworded
"proposal", "call-for-discussion", "call-for-votes", etc.  Articles in
rec.humor could be keyworded "pun", "shaggy-dog", "licence-plate",
"racist", "frayed-knot", etc.  This way we could write the keywords into
our kill-lists and show-lists, and guarantee that we see the stuff
we want and don't see the stuff we don't want.

This will have several effects that I like:

- All articles show up at my site, not just the ones the moderators like.
  So if a good article references a bad article, I can still go back
  to read the bad one.  Or if somebody on (the unmoderated) USENET calls
  me on the phone to tell me about a great article, I have it even if
  the moderators decided it was boring trash.

- My tastes can be completely different from the moderators, and it will
  still give me information I want.

- All articles from USENET are redistributed to all IMN sites.  This
  keeps compilation and digest copyrights intact since the compilations
  are never broken up.

- People who get articles from IMN can still redistribute them, as long as
  they don't redistribute IMN's keywords (which will presumable be
  copyrighted by IMN itself).  In fact, the keywords could even be shipped
  as a separate file from the articles themselves; maybe one new file in
  each news batch, with a bunch of <message-ID> <keyword-list> pairs, to
  describe the articles in that batch.  This would be especially nice for
  sites who are already getting cheap newsfeeds from somebody else, who
  just want to buy the keyword lists from IMN.

So how about it?  This is a service I'd subscribe to.  Anybody else?

--
Tom Fitzgerald             Wang Laboratories, Software Psychotherapy Group
uunet!wang!fitz
wang!fitz@uunet.uu.net     Disclaimer: my opinions change on an hourly basis.
508-967-5865