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From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc
Subject: Re: Statistics by article (was: A request for a new news feature)
Message-ID: <33321@sun.uucp>
Date: Sun, 8-Nov-87 19:27:47 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.33321
Posted: Sun Nov  8 19:27:47 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Nov-87 06:06:11 EST
References: <1381@cartan.Berkeley.EDU> <1987Nov6.124824.20374@sq.uucp>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: Fictional Reality, uLtd
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Xref: mnetor news.admin:1362 news.misc:1113

>> In this scheme, rn would
>> monitor which articles each reader actually reads, and how long each
>> reader spends on those articles.

>This is an intriguing idea, but there are technical problems.

Erik Fair wrote an article a while back about this for Login:. The concept
was called an Accolade (design by Erik, cute name by me). The whole idea was
that you could keep track of what other people read, and only read those
articles that other folks (whose reading taste you trust) felt was worth
reading. Sort of like a net-wide kill file at a very high level of
abstraction.

One minor problem. If everyone starts sending out Accolade messages on
everything they read, what do you think will happen to network traffic? 
Even if you limit it to sending one message per rn session and sending it to
a single point (ala Arbitron) instead of broadcasting it to the net, the
amount of data being slogged around is astounding. If you figure 7,000
people read usenet once a day (very low numbers! VERY low numbers) and the
package is 1,000 bytes, the receiving end needs to handle seven megabytes of
data a day. And these numbers are ridiculously small -- you could triple
them and still not be realistic.

It's a very nice idea. But from a technical point of view, it is a cure much
worse than the disease.

chuq
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Chuq "Fixed in 4.0" Von Rospach			chuq@sun.COM	Delphi: CHUQ