Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tektronix!percival!qiclab!sopwith!snoopy
From: snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Finding a needle in a haystack (was: future public nets)
Message-ID: <87@sopwith.UUCP>
Date: 15 Jan 89 05:38:22 GMT
References: <75@sopwith.UUCP> <377@intek01.UUCP>
Reply-To: snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy)
Organization: The Daisy Hill Puppy Farm
Lines: 34

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'?  KILL files help,
|> but not enough.  Moderation sometimes helps, but often the moderator bends
|> a group far too strongly in the direction of their own interests.
|
|Have you tried the "vn" newsreader?  It presents a screenful of message
|titles, and you just pick the ones you want.  It makes picking just a few
|articles out of a huge batch about as quick as it can be.

Haven't tried vn.  I've used readnews and vnews, and currently use rn.
The '=' command is sometimes helpful.  I currently have it presenting
articles grouped by subject, however this slows things down as rn needs
lots of disk i/o bandwidth to go hunting for matching subjects in a
couple hundred articles scattered around on the disk.  (Even the Fast File
System isn't perfect.)  Even after it already hunted down all the subjects
to do the kill file processing!?

But these and other suggestions people have posted miss the point.  News
volume is increasing exponentially, our time to read news isn't.  To
continue using usenet effectively, we MUST build better tools to screen
articles.  Not just *slightly* better tools, but tools that are as much
an improvement over rn as rn was over readnew/vnews.  This won't be easy,
as Larry has already done all the obvious stuff and more.  (Thanks Larry!)
Or find good moderators for 95% of the newsgroups.  And figure out some way
to keep the moderators from getting buried.
    _____     
   /_____\    Snoopy	"You are lost in a maze of newsgroups, all different."
  /_______\   
    |___|     tektronix!tekecs!sopwith!snoopy
    |___|     sun!nosun!illian!sopwith!snoopy