Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!olivea!uunet!mcrware!eric
From: eric@mcrware.UUCP (Eric Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.multimedia
Subject: Re: Personalised News Systems
Summary: consumer acceptance
Keywords: Personal News
Message-ID: <6997@mcrware.UUCP>
Date: 20 Jun 91 14:38:20 GMT
References: <6356@mindlink.bc.ca>
Reply-To: eric@mcrware.UUCP (Eric Miller)
Organization: Microware Systems Corp., Des Moines, Iowa
Lines: 42

In article <6356@mindlink.bc.ca> Rick_McCormack@mindlink.bc.ca (Rick McCormack) writes:

>(b) The electronic newspaper has two major drawbacks to gaining popularity.
>Suprisingly, the market for an ad-free paper is small; many rely on local ads
>in their paper to key them into their community. Also, reader surveys show that
>many skim a newspaper, and read things they never would have thought would be
>of interest to them.  Trying to keep this "spontaneous selection" process
>intact in a "dedicated" newspaper is impossible.
>
>The best compromise seems to be (at present) to create an "electronic clipping
>service" to search out references to items/companies/topics that you want, and
>to have the option of adding to and modifying these lists frequently, while
>still reading a "general newspaper."

I recently heard a speech by Robert Maxwell in which he described this very
service.  He was actually speaking in the context of print media staying
competitive with CNN and others.  Of course, everyone's question is "Would
a significant number of people use such a service?"  and "Could you make it
cheap enough that people will subscribe to all of those articles that they
would normally only skim through?"  I am afraid that "us techies" represent
the minority opinion in the big picture...

>I would be very interested in a system that would pick these items off my
>computer screen, and, [...convert the...]
>written article to audio, for use in my car or portable player. Thus, I would
>run my scanner program while getting breakfast, grab the cassette, and listen
>to it on the way to where-ever.

Actually, the best thing would be to download the data in
audio format directly, instead of converting from text to speech.  Use a low
sample rate since the fidelity doesn't have to be fantastic, and you could
squeeze quite a bit a data into a fairly narrow bandwidth carrier.

Of course this defeats the Maxwell proposal of maintaining a print media.
For that, you either need low cost personal fax machines or a printer connected
to your home information terminal.  Either way, it's exciting to me.

(((enough rambling, they must be making the coffee stronger here lately...)))

Eric Miller
Microware Systems Corp
Des Moines, IA