Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!percival!gary
From: gary@percival.UUCP (Gary Wells)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Ads on the net...What if we had a "catalog" site?
Message-ID: <1363@percival.UUCP>
Date: 13 Sep 88 22:06:07 GMT
Reply-To: gary@percival.UUCP (Gary Wells)
Organization: Percy's UNIX, Portland, OR.
Lines: 37

Here's an idea for general brainstorming:

What if there were a "catalog" site: someone who specifically accepted 
submissions from all and sundry vendors/providers/retailers/etc.  This would
constitute a catalog of net accessable services, products, whatever.  It could
be set up as a database kind of deal, with key field searches based of different
catagories of products, services.

I think it would have to be done so that each organization using the service did
their own maintenance/updates, and care would have to be taken that competing
entities got even-handed access/display.  

I'm a little hazy on how it would be accessed by people wanting to search the 
database.  A complete transfer of the entire database could get out of hand,
but I don't know how a user could access a particular site and run a search
program remotely.

The idea here is, obviously, that _I_ do want to see advertisemnts on the net,
but I _don't_ want all the newsgroups to degenerate into a commerical.  I have
a machine (with limited freee space) that I'm in the process of bringing up that
I would be willing to try this out on _IF_ 1) it meets with net approval and 
2) it can be done without tying up my dataline during the hours when I use it
for my profession  (1400-0000) 3)it doesn't require that I spend all my free 
time administering it.

Also note that I prefer to hack hardware, not software, so I'm not likely to
write any incredibly spiffy software, but I would be happy to work with anyone
who thought they could.

Since this is offered as a discussion starter, lets use followups, not mail.
.

-- 
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Still working on _natural_ intelligence.

gary@percival   (...!tektronix!percival!gary)