fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu (Erik E. Fair) (01/25/89)
Eliot Lear (BIONET, late of Rutgers University) and I (Apple Computer, late a lot of the time) are hosting a BOF (that's Birds Of a Feather, and supposedly we flock together) to discuss some ideas about User Interfaces to netnews (e.g. rn, readnews, vnews, vn, gnus, Gnews). TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 1989, 18:00 - 20:00 PST at San Diego USENIX (I dunno which room we got; it'll be on the BOF board) We are specifically interested in answering the question: How Can I Read All This Stuff And Still Get Real Work Done? that is, what additions, subtractions, modifications, etc. can we make to the netnews user interfaces that will help us all get more out of USENET, while not spending all our time doing it. This means techniques for sorting, structuring, filtering, selecting, and otherwise automatically processing articles to the point where the Ideal Interface (which doesn't exist yet, so far as I'm concerned) will show me articles that I am (or might be, if this is a day when I have more time to play) interested in, and will not show me things that I'm not interested in, for some arbitrary (and individual) definition of "interested". If you have some ideas on how this might be accomplished, we'd love to hear them, and if you can work up a quick presentation (I'd skip the history - we're all drowning in the same ocean of information), so much the better. The whole point is to stimulate some progress in this area, and we VERY strongly encourage IMPLEMENTORS to join in, since these good ideas will go nowhere if no one implements them. You know who you are! We're not really interested in new transport ideas for this BOF; Rick Adams is having a UUNET BOF, and he'd probably love to hear about a new whizzy-keeno compression algorithmn, or new file transfer protocols that you've hacked into UUCP. We consider the transport problem to be solved (for now; we might get near drowning our systems in bits again later) and we're MUCH more interested in the human information overload problem. Brainstorm time, people! we're looking forward to seeing you there, Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu Eliot Lear bionet!lear lear@net.bio.net
eric@snark.uu.net (Eric S. Raymond) (01/26/89)
In <27728@ucbvax.berkeley.edu> fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu (Erik E. Fair) writes: > [Announcement of USENET user interfaces BOF] > > The whole point is to stimulate some progress in this area, and we > VERY strongly encourage IMPLEMENTORS to join in, since these good > ideas will go nowhere if no one implements them. You know who you are! Yes, yes, I know. You mean me (among a few others). I'd love to be there and tell you guys all about my thread-following code and the enhanced subject-line listing features and schemes for implementing hypertext-style filter-by-link. Abd I'd love to hear about good new design ideas. Unfortunately, working on TMNN and my recent hardware troubles have left me in a bad hole -- I can't *afford* USENIX. Even the bloody *plane fare* would sink me. Unless you can get the conference organizers to scholarship me, I'm not gonna be there. Sigh... -- Eric S. Raymond (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews) Email: eric@snark.uu.net CompuServe: [72037,2306] Post: 22 S. Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (215)-296-5718