Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!alberta!ubc-cs!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!rutgers!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!saturn!ssyx.ucsc.edu!koreth From: koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Finding a needle in a haystack (was: future public nets) Message-ID: <5859@saturn.ucsc.edu> Date: 25 Dec 88 11:45:32 GMT References: <75@sopwith.UUCP> <377@intek01.UUCP> Sender: usenet@saturn.ucsc.edu Reply-To: koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) Organization: The Mad Scientists' Guild Lines: 37 In article <377@intek01.UUCP> mark@intek01.UUCP (Mark McWiggins) writes: >From article <75@sopwith.UUCP>, by snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy): >> ... There is a lot of useful information >> in usenet, but it is often buried in garbage. How much time do you want >> to spend skimming through articles hitting 'k' or 'n'? >Have you tried the "vn" newsreader? It presents a screenful of message Actually, it seems to me that Usenet is really archaic as it exists now. Netnews has many aspects of a hypertext system, but it's not quite there. Why not scrap all the news software and start anew? It should be possible to retain all of the old functionality, but in a new context. For instance, quoting part of an article and commenting on it is VERY hypertext-ish -- but why retransmit most of the original article every time it's quoted? How about saying "this part of my message is a response to bytes 150 through 402 of message 108832@foo.bar?" The news software could optionally insert the proper part of the original, thus mimicing the behavior of the news system we have now; or it could allow the reader to jump around the links between messages. (Readers of this newsgroup/mailing list should already be familiar with the other aspects of hypertext; it should be apparent that reading messages organized in this way would make it much easier to get at the information you want.) As well as making news a lot easier (and more fun) to peruse, this scheme could dramatically reduce the bandwidth eaten by net messages. I haven't seen any hard numbers on this, but I imagine that a good 25% of the text that gets sent around is in the form of quotes from older articles. Naturally, all this would take some getting used to, and a good many people would cry out in confusion and ask for the old, simple software again. But hypertext is obviously going to replace what we have now at some point; why not get all the kinks out of the system now, before it becomes even more widespread? --- It's 5:10 on Christmas morning and still no sign of Santa... Steven Grimm Moderator, comp.{sources,binaries}.atari.st koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu uunet!ucbvax!ucscc!ssyx!koreth