dee@cca.UUCP (Donald Eastlake) (03/09/85)
I take a different view of all this. Seems like most of the people and
software involved take the view that there is a certain clearly defined
body of news that you want to read all of and the rest you don't want to
see (but your site, if it feeds others, should normally pass on). Maybe
this material you want to see is limited to certain news groups,
moderated or not. If there are too many items or two much trash
polluting the news you want to see, then software should be UNfriendly,
we should nuke certain subjects or senders, maybe split up the newgroups
a bit more, ...
I think the correct view is that, for a first order approximation, there
is always an infinite amount of news. The only think you can ever hope
to do is a rough automatic priority ordering. Thus you need a news
program which can use the news groups, subject lines, author, length,
age, etc. of the items to do this using values set by the user. Of
course I understand this would be hard to do right and I have to say
that I don't have the time to do it. You would have to handle threads
of items and reponses in some way if a user wanted to follow the
conversations. You should probably heuristicly burst digests and treat
the enclosed messages separately. You would want some way to also give
weighted preference to key words in titles (if the whole title had not
been seen before and give a value by the user), summaries, and possibly
full text. The system needs to be robust enough to work in the real
news world; I don't think any magic list of predefined keywords is going
to be of much help. There needs to be some way to change preferences
during a session, etc.
Although I think many people would agree with the desireability of a
system as I describe in the previous paragraph, more controversial would
be to apply the same idea to news retention/forwarding. Still I think
it would be reasonable if there are limits of disk space, dollars, etc.,
such that you can't keep all news as long as you would like or forward
it all, you could use some approximation to the combined preferences
from all your users to determine these things. For news feeds, it would
be nice to be able to also include profiles from the sites you feed.
--
+1 617-492-8860 Donald E. Eastlake, III
ARPA: dee@CCA-UNIX usenet: {decvax,linus}!cca!dee