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From: emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups,comp.groupware
Subject: Re: Reform Trial.* (was: Trial flawed)
Message-ID: <EMV.91Jun1010753@bronte.aa.ox.com>
Date: 1 Jun 91 05:07:59 GMT
References: <1991May30.144345.15890@gorm.ruc.dk>
	<1991May31.022710.11297@looking.on.ca>
	<1991May31.192813.28009@gorm.ruc.dk>
	<1991Jun01.041929.8253@looking.on.ca>
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Organization: MSEN, Inc. Ann Arbor MI
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In-Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca's message of 1 Jun 91 04:19:29 GMT

In article <1991Jun01.041929.8253@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:

   Of course, I have done something about that, and on my own machine, I am
   fed exactly the set of current groups being read on my own site and
   downstream sites, and this is done without human intervention.  This is what
   I belive the long term solution to be.

How do you discover new groups?  What if someone says "hm, i wonder
what is in alt.industrial, has anyone said anything interesting in
there in the last month?"  You can't believe that a 45 character blurb
approved by someone who doesn't even read the group is going to help
you there.  It's mighty handy to keep around a day or two of news in
even the most random and banal of newsgroups on the off chance that
something interesting will pop up.

this is especially true of news reading schemes which cut across a
broad swath of groups looking for interesting things.  many topics
don't have their own newsgroup, and there's no good guess where the
next bit of interesting materials will pop up.

   However, until everybody uses a dynamic feeding scheme of some sort, and as
   long as usenet grows to fill the disk space available, it will continue to
   be inefficient in the extreme to have a group of 100 people distributed to
   10,000 or 20,000 machines.

groups of 100 people don't tend to have newsgroups.  remember the
lurker factor, it's a considerable number of folks who never post
anything but still read the net.  (hi lurkers!)  inefficient netnews
systems tend to get squashed out pretty ruthlessly, anyways -- if
people want dynamic feeding, i'm sure that once they're convinced of
its utilities and cost savings they'll start to use it.  

in addition, your licence agreement for dynafeed puts it out of the
reach of a number of systems which might otherwise consider it.

--Ed