Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!chuq
From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: news.billboard
Message-ID: <37126@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 8 Dec 89 17:03:36 GMT
References: <1076@utoday.UUCP> <810@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG> <37116@apple.Apple.COM> <74831@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps
Lines: 37

kannan@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Kannan Varadhan) writes:

>Isn't that what news.announce.newgroups is supposed to be doing, with
>its "call for discussions" postings?

No, not really. The idea of news.billboard is so if, for instance, we decide
to start up an interesting discussion on Lithuanian Sheepdogs in
talk.politics.soviet we can post a message in news.billboard saying "Hey!
There's an interesting discussion on Lithuanian Sheepdogs in
talk.politics.soviet. C'mon down!" This is considered to be better than
cross-posting the discussion to rec.pets for some reason (which would
accomplish the same thing -- informing the interested audience, unless you
believe there'd be a pocket of Lithuanian Sheepdog fanciers who don't read
rec.pets but would read news.billboard).

Of course, the charter would specifically exclude boring discussions of
Lithuanian Sheepdogs, so you'd never see a "Hey! There's a boring discussion
on Lithuanian Sheepdogs in talk.politics.soviet..."

Of course, the definition of 'interesting' is left up to the poster. "Hey!
there's an interesting discussion of slime mold being started up in sci.bio!
Everyone come join!". Also, imagine how useful news.billboard would be if
it was getting 50 "new discussion (interesting)" postings a day. Especially
since half of them would probably have subject lines like "Interesting
discussion starting" on them.



-- 

Chuq Von Rospach   <+>   chuq@apple.com   <+>   [This is myself speaking]

When it comes to matters ourside your specialties, you are consistently and
brilliantly stupid [....] with respect to matters you haven't studied and
have had no experience basing your opinions on casual gossip [....] and
plain misinformation -- unsuspected because you haven't attempted to verify it.
	-- Robert Heinlein to J.W. Campbell, Jr. 1941