fer tha tiiiimes they are a-swankin' !

Robert Holder (robert@whiplash.er.usgs.gov)
Tue, 8 Dec 92 18:14:18 EST

by duke.cs.duke.edu (5.65/2.24G/4.1.1)
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 92 19:01:57 -0500
From: trt@cs.duke.edu (Thomas R. Truscott)
To: chuq@medraut.apple.com, thomas%mvac23.uucp@udel.edu
Subject: Re: MacroOrganism
Cc: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu

The latest CACM is a special issue on "Information Filtering".
There is an article from Xerox Parc that mentions a
system for filtering Usenet articles.
There is a anyone-can-be-moderator feature:
e.g. one can subscribe to all articles that either Jack or Jill liked.

There are services that inform people of new journal articles
that may be of interest. For example, I can ask to be notified
of all papers whose title and/or contents contains
either "mobile" or "nomadic" and either "computing" or "networking".
(Alas, that coughs up papers about ion mobility in VLSI chips.)
It would be nice to be able to catch all articles
about certain projects, ideas, or people
(or articles *from* certain people or places).

Some work could also be done on improving the quality of posted articles.
It would be nice if postnews did a spelling check.
When a user does a "followup", postnews could check if any unread
followups were present.
And it could offer to "hold" the article for some period,
checking for subsequent followups, before prompting the user to
"really" post the article.
That would also provide a way for users to scribble when inspired
yet allow time for revisions, second thoughts, etc.

Tom Truscott

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