Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!unixhub!shelby!neon!Neon!jmc From: jmc@Gang-of-Four.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk Subject: selective reading Message-ID: Date: 17 Nov 90 03:25:11 GMT Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System) Distribution: comp.org.eff.talk Organization: /u/jmc/.organization Lines: 25 I'm not sure this is the right newsgroup for this proposal. If not, I hope someone will point me in the right direction. Too many articles are posted every day, even for the subset of newsgroups that interest me. I'm sure everyone else has the same problem. Suppose someone undertakes to edit a newsgroup, e.g. this one. He reads all of it each day and labels some of the articles priority 1 and priority 2 and ignores what he considers junk. He can use whatever criteria he likes, e.g. he can ignore all articles that don't agree with his politics. The articles are suitably marked and anyone who agrees with this editor's taste can get only those. Someone with different ideas about what is worth reading can be a rival editor. Each editor will have his fans. We can also imagine that an editor can span several newsgroups, so his followers can be even lazier if they want. There are several ways of realizing this. The simplest for Usenet is that an editor's list can be posted as just another item, and the user has software that reads the list and displays the items. Before suggesting this to the maintainers of newsreading programs, I would like to see some discussion of the idea, both as a social idea and technically.