jmc@Gang-of-Four.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) (11/17/90)
I'm not sure this is the right newsgroup for this proposal. If not, I hope someone will point me in the right direction. Too many articles are posted every day, even for the subset of newsgroups that interest me. I'm sure everyone else has the same problem. Suppose someone undertakes to edit a newsgroup, e.g. this one. He reads all of it each day and labels some of the articles priority 1 and priority 2 and ignores what he considers junk. He can use whatever criteria he likes, e.g. he can ignore all articles that don't agree with his politics. The articles are suitably marked and anyone who agrees with this editor's taste can get only those. Someone with different ideas about what is worth reading can be a rival editor. Each editor will have his fans. We can also imagine that an editor can span several newsgroups, so his followers can be even lazier if they want. There are several ways of realizing this. The simplest for Usenet is that an editor's list can be posted as just another item, and the user has software that reads the list and displays the items. Before suggesting this to the maintainers of newsreading programs, I would like to see some discussion of the idea, both as a social idea and technically.
brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (11/17/90)
This is possible to do, and I even considered implementing it for a time, but is it all that new? The current publishing industry works that way, but for a more select crowd. The budding writers all submit their stories everywhere hoping for a sale. People read the magazines whose editorial style they like. The editors get paid. To be honest, as somebody who has been vaguely like the sort of editor you suggest (without competition) I am not sure how many people would do it as a hobby for any length of time. It can get trying at times. (Particularly when you have to put up with attack as well as the task at hand.) -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
jmc@Gang-of-Four.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) (11/19/90)
If we had the software for selective editing, we could see how many editors would appear and how long they would keep up assigning priorities.
king@motcid.UUCP (Steven King) (11/19/90)
In article <JMC.90Nov16192511@Gang-of-Four.stanford.edu> jmc@Gang-of-Four.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) writes: >Suppose someone undertakes to edit a newsgroup, e.g. this one. He >reads all of it each day and labels some of the articles priority 1 >and priority 2 and ignores what he considers junk. He can use >whatever criteria he likes, e.g. he can ignore all articles that don't >agree with his politics. The articles are suitably marked and anyone >who agrees with this editor's taste can get only those. Sorry to disappoint you, but it's been done. It's being done. And it seems to be working just fine. There's a plethora of moderated Usenet newsgroups. They fall into two categories. The first is strictly editted. All submissions go to the moderator and he chooses to print whichever he feels appropriate. The Telecom Digest (comp.dcom.telecom) is one of these, as is the Risks Digest (comp.risks). The other type of digest more closely follows your idea. For that type the moderator reads a newsgroups and distills it down to just the interesting (his own definition) postings. The group rec.humor.funny is the only one of this type that comes to mind. As far as I know there's no competition among digest editors. I imagine that such a thing would bring about great cries of wasted bandwidth and other evils. -- ---------------------------------------------------+--------------------------- Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all | Steven King four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, | Motorola Cellular sugar, and fat. (Alex Levine) | ...uunet!motcid!king
wex@pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) (11/22/90)
In article <JMC.90Nov16192511@Gang-of-Four.stanford.edu> jmc@Gang-of-Four.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) writes: >Too many articles are posted every day, even for the subset of newsgroups >that interest me. I'm sure everyone else has the same problem. > >Suppose someone undertakes to edit a newsgroup, e.g. this one. He >reads all of it each day and labels some of the articles priority 1 >and priority 2 and ignores what he considers junk. He can use [...] >Before >suggesting this to the maintainers of newsreading programs, I would >like to see some discussion of the idea, both as a social idea and >technically. Something similar to this idea has (I'm told) grown up on CMU's campus, based around the Andrew Message System. I'm away from my notes, but I think if you check Borenstein's paper in CSCW'88 you'll find some mention of the emergent role of editor in the context of AMS. THe basic idea was that people found that (relatively trusted) colleagues read particular groups and would go to those people to find out what was going on therein. Eventually these people got more or less well known and started redictributing filtered versions all over campus. On the Usenet today, there is rec.humor.funny, which contains culls from the vast volume of rec.humor. Also John Berryhill offers a no-fee occasional compilation of postings to alt.drugs for sites which censor that group. -- --Alan Wexelblat phone: (508)294-7485 Bull Worldwide Information Systems internet: wex@pws.bull.com Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.
emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti) (11/26/90)
In article <5367@orchid3.UUCP> king@motcid.UUCP (Steven King) writes: In article <JMC.90Nov16192511@Gang-of-Four.stanford.edu> jmc@Gang-of-Four.stanford.edu (John McCarthy) writes: >Suppose someone undertakes to edit a newsgroup, e.g. this one. He >reads all of it each day and labels some of the articles priority 1 >and priority 2 and ignores what he considers junk. Sorry to disappoint you, but it's been done. It's being done. And it seems to be working just fine. There's a plethora of moderated Usenet newsgroups.... The other type of digest more closely follows your idea. For that type the moderator reads a newsgroups and distills it down to just the interesting (his own definition) postings. comp.archives is an example of the 2d type, exc. instead of distilling from a single group or from an incoming stream of mail (a la rec.humor.funny) it takes its source material from a bunch of groups. It's not really a discussion group though, and the material doesn't age as much with time as (say) this group does; while you might want to look through an index of 6 month old comp.archives articles looking for something, chances are you're not going to be too keen on trying to keep up with conversations here with a lag of even as little as a week. Moderated groups are also prone to failure, e.g. the periodic disappearance of comp.sys.sun whenever the moderator gets a new (and better) job. --Ed emv@ox.com moderator, comp.archives member, league for programming freedom