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From: bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Hypertext Usenet
Message-ID: <8711072049.AA23357@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Sat, 7-Nov-87 15:49:07 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.8711072049.AA23357
Posted: Sat Nov  7 15:49:07 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Nov-87 04:29:33 EST
References: <8711070303.AA04978@hop.toad.com>
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Re: John Gimore's note

I think your note draws out excellent points but I do disagree with
the rejection of establishing a generalized hook into the text early.

The goal there was to provide one of the several critical things I
believe people need to begin working on these systems. I suppose part
of the difference in view is whether some-one- will just go away with
the basic concept, come up with something that solves all the problems
and post it to the net (and incorporate whatever solutions s/he has
found and that will be that.)

Although I believe some of this will occur I think we do need to speak
as a community intellect about what we are willing to tolerate and
what our goals are. Laying out a certain amount of this in public is a
great way to avoid design errors.

You propose that only article linking is necessary at this stage. I
think it just opens the same can-o-worms. Do we allow multiple links?
If we do can we have some way of distinguishing why these particular
links exist, for example "HISTORY: <1234@hop.toad.com>" as one link
and "LEGAL: <5678@bu-cs.bu.edu>" as another? I would claim that if
that is found attractive it may as well have been dropped down to the
textual level as all that engenders is re-encoding the information
already in the text (although I could still see tagged links as
desirable, I guess my point is information theoretic, there's no way
to throw the bathwater out w/o the baby.)

I agree strongly on your ideas about a distributed data base. Even on
the site specifics it's also occurred to me that a user doing a 's'ave
on an article should just somehow create a pointer and stop expire
from reaping the article rather than saving the text in a personal
file.

In fact, analysis of such pointers could provide a lot more depth to
the kind of statistics gathering that Brian Reid does about net
behavior. It would provide the feedback that Ted Nelson talked about
in his hypertext systems where somehow we know precisely who is being
read and cherished (gather the pointers from 1000 sites, break them
down by author, you've got some sort of popularity [not necessarily
positive] indicator.)

Anyhow, I await reactions.

	-Barry Shein