gary@percival.UUCP (Gary Wells) (09/14/88)
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. . -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Still working on _natural_ intelligence. gary@percival (...!tektronix!percival!gary)
jim@fsc2086.UUCP (Jim O'Connor) (09/15/88)
In article <1363@percival.UUCP>, gary@percival.UUCP (Gary Wells) writes: > 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'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. > I subscribe to the uunet service, and they have an archive service which accepts requests for archive files via e-mail. For instance, doing $ echo send volume1/elm2/part14 from comp.sources.unix | mail uunet!netlib will cause instructions to transfer that particular file to your machine. (This may only work for uunet subscribers, so please don't try it.) As I understand it, there is a program at uunet which gets all the mail intended for "netlib", which then interprets the lines in the message as requests (if possible), and then processes them. Could something similar be used in this case? For instance, use $ echo search category.hardware for keys modem 2400 MNC | mail somesite!catalog to request info. Then the program that reads catalog's mail, could use the "keys" to look up product info in whatever fashion is appropriate. Once found, the info could be mailed back to the requestor using e-mail. As far as submitting info goes, a program could process $ cat prod.annouce | mail somesite!catalog where the first line of prod.annouce contained info about what category the annoucement should go into, and perhaps some important key words to be stored for fast look up (other keywords could be looked for using something like grep). The rest of the message would contain the announcement/advertise- ment, and could be stored as a (possibly compressed) text file. This would keep ads out of the news itself, but via the e-mail work, would still pass the stuff through the network. As long as the catalog site can get e-mail from most everyone and send to most everyone, then equal access should be maintained. Some sites might object to adding an incentive to pass more commercial info via e-mail, but since there already seems to be some of that going on, it might not hurt anything. Question to pose: since having such a site might reduce the e-mail traffic at vendor's machines, and the overhead of answering the same requests over and over again, and get their product's name into the hands of possibly thousands of user's, would companies who wished to make info available through such a service, be interested in paying membership fees to support the costs of the catalog site? Of course, for this type of system to work really well, requests for info from users would always be free of charge. What other ideas are out there? --- James B. O'Connor +1 615 821 4090 x651 Filtration Sciences Corp. UUCP: uunet!fsc2086!jim 105 West 45th Street or jim@fsc2086.UUCP Chattanooga, TN 37411