Newsgroups: news.future
Path: sparky!uunet!usc!sdd.hp.com!caen!heifetz!emv
From: e...@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
Subject: Bury Usenet.
Message-ID: <1992Mar3.014809.7355@msen.com>
Organization: MSEN, Inc. -- Ann Arbor, MI
References: <1992Mar02.194823.8015@chinacat.unicom.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1992 01:48:09 GMT
Lines: 5
Go to the newsgroup "alt.society.cu-digest" and read
"Bury Usenet". If you have a good newsreader, the references
line in the header will take you to it.
--Ed
Newsgroups: news.future
Path: sparky!uunet!usc!rpi!clarkson!news.clarkson.edu!nelson
From: nel...@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson)
Subject: Re: Bury Usenet.
In-Reply-To: emv@msen.com's message of Tue, 3 Mar 1992 01:48:09 GMT
Message-ID: <NELSON.92Mar6094302@cheetah.clarkson.edu>
Sender: ne...@news.clarkson.edu
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Organization: Clarkson University, Potsdam NY
References: <1992Mar02.194823.8015@chinacat.unicom.com>
<1992Mar3.014809.7355@msen.com>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1992 14:43:02 GMT
Lines: 26
In article <1992Mar3.0...@msen.com> e...@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti) writes:
Go to the newsgroup "alt.society.cu-digest" and read
"Bury Usenet". If you have a good newsreader, the references
line in the header will take you to it.
I read it. It has its points. One Usenet flaw that he missed is the fact
that, since articles are thrown away after (no more than, and usually much
less than) two weeks, an author probably considers his writing to be a
"throw-away". Another flaw is that Usenet has no corporate memory (other
than FAQ files, which are a blessed innovation).
Perhaps those two problems might be addressed by a new hierarchy with an
expire period of six months? Because of the context of other "throw-away"
newsgroups, this hierarchy would need to be moderated. Otherwise you would
have too many people who didn't realize that the "six-month" hierarchy was
different.
In re the "low-bandwidth" argument, Ed, what happened to your attempt to
mark up Usenet postings? You started that at the end of your comp.archives
reign, but I don't remember it going anywhere...
--
--russ <nel...@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> I'm proud to be a humble Quaker.
Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is the presence of a system for
resolving conflicts before war becomes necessary. War never creates peace.
Newsgroups: news.future
Path: sparky!uunet!think.com!yale.edu!heifetz!emv
From: e...@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
Subject: Re: Bury Usenet.
Message-ID: <1992Mar6.162537.15905@msen.com>
Organization: MSEN, Inc. -- Ann Arbor, MI
References: <1992Mar02.194823.8015@chinacat.unicom.com>
<1992Mar3.014809.7355@msen.com> <NELSON.92Mar6094302@cheetah.clarkson.edu>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1992 16:25:37 GMT
In regards to <NELSON.92...@cheetah.clarkson.edu>
Netnews is not throwaway postings any more. Kent Landfield and the
folks at Sterling Software are putting each month's output (sans
a few of the grainy pictures groups) onto CD-ROM, and they're working
on tools to integrate the stored articles on read-only disk in with
your normal spool directory so that it looks like you really do have
the whole thing on line.
The other missing link is the widespread availability of WAIS indexes
for most newsgroups or for all of usenet at a particular time. Right
now several dozen newsgroups have some kind of WAIS-based retroactive
searching capacity; as time goes by you'll expect to see more of these,
plus e.g. WAIS indexes of the netnews CD-ROMs. With some work on the
WAIS protocol it should also be possible to support very focused queries
like "all articles from Russ Nelson in the newsgroup news.future", since
you have all those nice headers to work from a few extra indexes will
let that happen.
I regularly go back to old comp.archives postings back two years and
10,000 articles ago to find things. It's real handy.
>In re the "low-bandwidth" argument, Ed, what happened to your attempt to
>mark up Usenet postings? You started that at the end of your comp.archives
>reign, but I don't remember it going anywhere...
I'm hoping that nsb will solve the problem for me by making MIME so
popular and useful that people do their own markup ...
>--russ <nel...@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> I'm proud to be a humble Quaker.
--
Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, MSEN Inc. e...@msen.com
MSEN Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI 48103 +1 313 741 1120
"Things are glued together with spit and bailing wire now."
Newsgroups: news.future
Path: sparky!uunet!think.com!ames!data.nas.nasa.gov!wilbur!eugene
From: eug...@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya)
Subject: FAQs was Bury Usenet.
References: <1992Mar02.194823.8015@chinacat.unicom.com>
<1992Mar3.014809.7355@msen.com> <NELSON.92Mar6094302@cheetah.clarkson.edu>
Sender: ne...@nas.nasa.gov
Organization: NAS, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 92 23:21:12 GMT
Message-ID: <1992Mar10.232112.14796@nas.nasa.gov>
Lines: 90
In article <NELSON.92...@cheetah.clarkson.edu>
nel...@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) writes:
>I read it. It has its points. One Usenet flaw that he missed is the fact
>that, since articles are thrown away after (no more than, and usually much
>less than) two weeks, an author probably considers his writing to be a
>"throw-away". Another flaw is that Usenet has no corporate memory (other
>than FAQ files, which are a blessed innovation).
Blessed innovation? You have to add the smiley for the sarcasm. Oh you
are serious....
I am running about 80 of them right now and a number of control groups
as comparisons to the groups w/o FAQs. (No, they are not 80 different
groups [two of them are chained FAQs]). Two points:
1) You have to deal with the noise of an FAQ (it's an invasive mechanism).
2) You lose real experts regardless of an FAQ.
I can think of 4 more good reasons to not like FAQs. They do have some
limited positive impact.
I have watched discussions by good experts on many news groups and have
gone as far as $100K government research grants to one ex-comp.arch reader.
But he not longer has time to read.
The problem is they get flooded out by the noise and become very tired.
You can learn some of this stuff by doing two things (mechanisms):
a) post factually, but incomplete information
b) watch how inaccurate information propagates flame wars (in fact try
pulling a few flame war chains).
The current stages of newsgroup life:
|Stage 1): enthusiasm, but a lack of available knowledge and expertise
|Flurry and a bang in some cases. Experts trickle in.
|
|Stage 2): Unreasonable less knowledgeable, sometimes more emotional
|people driven out but knowledgeable reasonable people. "Flaming" and
|"flame wars" start. Some of the experts leave deciding there is too
|much noise.
|
|Stage 3): Experts driven out because of the repeated introductory
|questions by beginners. FAQs start to propagate,
|anonymous FTP is discovered, server daemons seem to have had their day
|as well.
|
|Stage 4): That's the next stage. Not clear what the developments are.
|New and improved news interface?
|
|Exceptions: knowledgeable group has information at stake. Call these
|spying groups. There are other kinds of groups as well.
Of course the experts get disillusioned (as I have seen many posts like
Mashey's recent one bemoaning "Haven't I posted this before?").
Ideally, what I think you want is still being researched. The closest
thing I have see is the CoLab at Xerox PARC which is now regarded to
have seen its days. You want a mass common memory accessible to anyone
to read. Then, a mechanism to add and take away ideas as they get back.
BBN and others have similar research facilities. (See CACM papers, the problem
is that these systems stay inside labs and aren't useful, and they don't
get beat on by large numbers of people in the real world where we have
dialogues and multilogues. You have to see or read the papers to understand
and appreciate some of the CoLab's ideas and problems).
I don't like archives, because they keep bad information around. FTP is
bad for this. I can give numerous examples like how do you treat
frostbite in rec.skiing or backcountry: we have gotten the "rub snow on it"
folklore which is very dangerous. Or what kind of gun should you carry around
for the period of time after an earthquake? How do you decide to throw
something out? The naive take things too personally. You will only get
incensed if you see life threatening information posted on the net. We have
started to become a bit too jaded like nurses in an ER.
Let we forget we also have mail server daemons. More hope in this area.
Oh, yes, moderation can be a good thing. I think that for some groups,
the sci and comp groups should be moderated. Then equivalent talk.* groups
can appear for unmoderated discussion. The problem is that you need
good moderators. The first appear exemplary, but we have a newer crop
of moderators who have political agendas. But then, who wouldn't?
Pure, raw, unadulterated data is not a safe thing. Data needs a context.
Then, who will pay for this? On the whole, I think the net is a positive
thing if you can get rid of the noise, but it requires a better interface.
Killfiles are not that interface.
--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eug...@orville.nas.nasa.gov
Resident Cynic, Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers
{uunet,mailrus,other gateways}!ames!eugene
This is the Usenet: do you expect anything other than gross generalizations?
Ref: Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, vol. 1, G. Polya
|