Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!giza.cis.ohio-state.edu!kannan From: kannan@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Kannan Varadhan) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: news.billboard Message-ID: <74853@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 9 Dec 89 00:28:00 GMT References: <1076@utoday.UUCP> <810@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG> <37116@apple.Apple.COM> <74831@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <37126@apple.Apple.COM> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Kannan Varadhan Organization: Dept. of Cptr & Info Science @ Ohio State University Lines: 49 Now that I understand what Chuq was driving at... ;-) Thus spake chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) >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. Isn't 50 a kinda teensy number? Can you imagine someone say, "Hey, there's an interesting discussion going on in comp.unix.wizards, about how to setup your prompt to reflect your current directory?", or someone else saying, "Hey, there's an interesting discussion about the GNU manifesto/charter in alt.religion.computers"? :-) :-) If you didn't moderate such a group, all of us would go berseck, and get confined to a mental assylum real soon. If you did moderate it, the moderator would be consigned to the mental assylum real sooner. Isn't there a chinese proverb which goes, "better you than I"? :-) Maybe what we need instead is some kind of summarizing schema, that is left to the user's discretion, to use as they please. For instance, I find it a reasonable guide to just scan the list of user's and the corresponding subjects as soon as I enter a newsgroup. A global list of such information could be kept somewhat trivially? From my minimalistic understanding of how the various news transport mechanisms work, here's how I think it would happen.. When a message is received, the poster, subject, keywords, abstract, and newsgroup are written to a file. When I want to read on Lithunian Sheep dogs, I can grep from the file, and see if anything interesting turned up. If instead, I see most postings of the day have been on changing directories, I can do a global catch up of sorts. I could grep on keywords, posters etc. Ofcourse, I am assuming that you are interested in what anyone anywhere anytime has to say about LSDs (Lithunian Sheep Dogs :-), or that poster X always makes sense (What am I saying here? Geez! :). KANNAN -- Kannan Varadhan, Ohio Supercomputer Center, Columbus, OH 43212 [(614) 292-4137] email: kannan@osc.edu | osu-cis!oscsunb!kannan