Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ames!hc!lll-winken!uunet!inco!alembic!csu
From: csu@alembic.UUCP (Dave Mack)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Two philosophies of why newsgroups should be created
Message-ID: <3157@alembic.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 89 06:07:31 GMT
References: <6503@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <3065@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: csu@alembic.UUCP (Dave Mack)
Organization: Alembic Systems
Lines: 78

In article <3065@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:
>I have seen two main camps of newsgroup creation philosophy.  They
>both have very strong merits.  I have wavered between them myself.
>
>The first camp says "Create only truly necessary groups -- keep the
>'namespace' small."
>
>The second camp says, "Create any reasonable group -- what trouble are
>small volume groups?"
>

>To me the most compelling argument for Camp 1 is that new newsgroups
>definitely do cause traffic that would not have otherwise existed.  While
>some groups might mostly split up traffic, it seems clear to me after 8
>years on usenet that new groups do cause more traffic than would have
>existed before.

Perhaps some, but how much? Consider: there are N people who post to the
net and each of those people only has a certain amount of time in which
to post. If they distribute that time across more newsgroups, then either
they don't post to groups they previously posted to or they post shorter
articles. (One could argue that they spend more time posting, but that 
has an obvious limit; if they spend too much time posting, they flunk
out of school or lose their job or starve to death, and thus cease posting
altogether.) Obviously, N is growing with time, but that isn't necessarily
a result of increasing the number of groups. The increasing volume on the
net is a mainly a function of the number of people on the net, not the
number of groups.

The "Camp 1" argument is fallacious in that ignores the fact that people
only have so much time to read and post.

>Camp 2 has good arguments as well.   Usenet needs more classification
>of articles to allow people to control their reading.  Some groups
>are simply too large and noisy to read.  And to me, high volume is the
>measure of a bad group, not a good one.
[...]
>At my suggestion, Eric Raymond has put a feature into his TMN news to support
>this concept.  Under that system if a message comes in to
>rec.arts.sf-lovers.asmiov, and the host does not have that group, but does
>have rec.arts.sf-lovers, then it goes into the first higher level group
>found, or junk beyond a certain level.  (This is how you finally did it,
>right Eric?)

I think this is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't solve the
problem of users finding the groups that interest them. How do I know to
ask for "rec.arts.sf-lovers.asmiov" (asmiov - heh!)?

Part of the argument between the two "camps" stems from the fact that
newsgroup name is used for two functions: it specifies the general area
of discussion for messages in the newsgroup and it is also used to specify
the way in which the news is distributed. One is a user interface function,
the other an administrative function. While some degree of overlap is
clearly necessary, it seems that the two functions should be more separated.

What we need is a method of extracting articles that interest the individual
reader independent of the name space. Example: if I want to read articles
about the cold fusion research going on now, I have to subscribe to 
alt.fusion, sci.physics, and possibly misc.headlines, and I'll still miss
articles posted to groups like sci.chem that may be relevant. What I'd
like is an interface that allows me to type 

                 "/fusion | deuterium/{sci,alt,misc,talk}"

and returns a list of articles from those top-level groups that contain
either of the words "fusion" or "deuterium" somewhere in them.

Obviously, grepping through every article is impractical. Maybe what we
need is a newsposter that automatically fills in the Keywords: line at
the time the article is posted, combined with a newsreader that searches
for specified tokens on the Keywords line of all articles in specified
groups.

There are problems with this approach, of course, but I suspect that
this is the direction we should be heading.

-- 
Dave Mack