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From: fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.notes
Subject: Re: Information Overload and What We Can Do About It
Message-ID: <10550@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 5-Oct-85 10:35:35 EDT
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Posted: Sat Oct  5 10:35:35 1985
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With regard to Chuq's comment about an `accolade' control message for
propagating `I liked that' marks on articles; I thought briefly about
that and decided that it's too hard to collect such information on a
netwide basis (nor would you really want to; there are just too many of
us), which is why I advocated it on a site wide basis only.

The other thing is that people with similiar professional interests are
loosely grouped by site.

With regard to keywords, it should be noted that I was advocating
automatic generation of a list of keywords from the text of the
article.  While this technique has some obvious problems (how many
keywords would you label this article with? How many of those words did
I actually use in the body of the article?), it is clearly superior to
people doing it on this network for two reasons:

	1. consistency
	2. higher probability of the selected keywords
		actually reflecting message content.

As it has been exhaustively pointed out, people are bad at selecting
keywords. In this area, we can expect the network community to be
better than average, but considerably worse than our expectations. All
you have to do for proof of this is look at the keywords that people
are attaching to articles now, even though the software does nothing
with them!

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU


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