fitz@wang.UUCP (Tom Fitzgerald ms 019 890) (07/06/89)
>According to kdb@InterCon.uu.net (Kurt Baumann): >> ... They are making money from sorting through >> the articles and then sending those that they found to have some content >> on to their subscribers. Strickly speaking they do not make money off of >> your articles, but rather from the screening service. chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) responds: > The profit isn't so bad (compare uunet and portal), but the redistribution > restrictions are a basic alteration of the character of Usenet. The act of > posting on Usenet grants redistribution rights to recipients. I'm beginning to think that IMN is selling the wrong thing. I don't want to pay somebody to withhold articles from me that they think I'm not interested in seeing. But I would pay somebody to give me accurate descriptions of articles that my newsreader could chew through to decide whether I want to see it. So, IMN, how about assigning your corps of crack moderators to giving articles good, usable, machine-readable keywords instead of just giving them a thumbs-up/thumbs down? Articles in news.groups could be keyworded "proposal", "call-for-discussion", "call-for-votes", etc. Articles in rec.humor could be keyworded "pun", "shaggy-dog", "licence-plate", "racist", "frayed-knot", etc. This way we could write the keywords into our kill-lists and show-lists, and guarantee that we see the stuff we want and don't see the stuff we don't want. This will have several effects that I like: - All articles show up at my site, not just the ones the moderators like. So if a good article references a bad article, I can still go back to read the bad one. Or if somebody on (the unmoderated) USENET calls me on the phone to tell me about a great article, I have it even if the moderators decided it was boring trash. - My tastes can be completely different from the moderators, and it will still give me information I want. - All articles from USENET are redistributed to all IMN sites. This keeps compilation and digest copyrights intact since the compilations are never broken up. - People who get articles from IMN can still redistribute them, as long as they don't redistribute IMN's keywords (which will presumable be copyrighted by IMN itself). In fact, the keywords could even be shipped as a separate file from the articles themselves; maybe one new file in each news batch, with a bunch of <message-ID> <keyword-list> pairs, to describe the articles in that batch. This would be especially nice for sites who are already getting cheap newsfeeds from somebody else, who just want to buy the keyword lists from IMN. So how about it? This is a service I'd subscribe to. Anybody else? -- Tom Fitzgerald Wang Laboratories, Software Psychotherapy Group uunet!wang!fitz wang!fitz@uunet.uu.net Disclaimer: my opinions change on an hourly basis. 508-967-5865
amanda@intercon.uu.net (Amanda Walker) (07/06/89)
In article <383@wang.UUCP>, fitz@wang.UUCP (Tom Fitzgerald ms 019 890) writes: > how about assigning your corps of crack moderators to giving > articles good, usable, machine-readable keywords instead of just giving > them a thumbs-up/thumbs down? Hey, Brad, are you out here :-)? There are people who are looking at this approach, both with humans and with software. However, as anyone who has used commercial keyword-based text retrieval systems can tell you, even professional keyworders (? is that a word :-)?) aren't all that good at it, and even in limited domains the number of keywords necessary to do a reasonable job becomes huge. Ever see a printed copy of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings--used for keyword-based searching of the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE databases)? It's a book a couple of inches thick printed in fine print. Granted, Usenet wouldn't need anything that rigorous, and keywording of some sort could make Usenet more tractable to automated filtering, but I still think that Geoff's service has its advantages. -- Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation amanda@intercon.uu.net | ...!uunet!intercon!amanda