lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (08/18/83)
Greetings. I was quite amused by the recent Usenet survey results. As I scanned through them, I kept having this feeling that I'd seen something similar years ago. Finally it struck me -- have any of you ever read a humorous book entitled "Up the Down Staircase"? It is the (fictional) "diary" of a new teacher at a tough NYC high school. At various points throughout the book, she inserts the contents of the "suggestion box" that she (supposedly) had hung in her classroom. There were always all sorts of notes, ranging from the long and serious to the short and bizarre, sometimes with added embellishments such as skull and crossbones or less ominous drawings. The whole tone of the abstracted Usenet survey comments reminded me strongly of those suggestion box materials. Anybody agree? As for the actual statistical results of the survey -- I have, uh, no comment at this time. --- A clarification should be made regarding moderated newsgroups. While the survey tended to lump digests together with the entire issue of group moderation, it has been my contention all along that most moderated newsgroups would *not* be turned into digests, but would instead simply have a moderator who remailed separate items in a reasonably organized manner. There are some groups which probably could benefit from digests, but let's keep in mind that digests are not *necessary* to make moderated newsgroups work in most cases. --- Finally, a few words about charging for network path info. Personally, I consider this to be a rather poor idea. If there's one datum of information that should be free on a computer network, it should be concerning relatively "least-cost" paths between nodes. In fact, the sites on the most limited budgets (the ones least likely to be able to pay for such information and probably also the most likely to have "problems" with a budget "line item" for "Usenet routing tables") are the very sites that *most* need that information to help control their communications costs! At previous Unix conferences, I recall seeing sheets where we were all encouraged to fill in our network routing information -- the impression was clearly given that this information would later be organized and distributed freely. I'd hate to see that sort of "free spirited" data wasted. Under a charging scheme, would we find some major sites attempting to charge the "network path business" itself for access to uuname and other data? I mean, after all, if a business is going to make money collecting and selling data, why can't the people providing the original raw data *also* charge? The whole idea of charging for any of this information sounds like an undesirable can of worms to me. That's about all I'd like to say about this for now, except to add that a business trying to provide routing information for a fee could be rather suddenly undercut. This could happen if a cooperating group of net wizards actually put their heads together and started distributing reasonable path information on a free basis (it's a big job, but given the generally geographic localization of the net, not an unreasonable task). --Lauren--