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- Here's an article I sent a while ago to various Usenet newsgroups:
-
- >With the enormous numbers of groups now existing, tracking
- >through all of them to find interesting and relevant topics
- >is becoming very hard, and it seems clear that the namespace
- >is becoming hopelessly muddled by democracy in action, so
- >a software solution might be the only way out.
-
- An idea just popped up in my head.
-
- Currently we have a news gateway to www (a www client can be used as a
- newsreader), which helps to organized groups better than the flat
- namespace of the newsgroups most other newsreaders seem to have. Ie. you
- create www nodes which have topically similar newsgroups listed
- together in a node and hypetext links to those newsgroups. Each user
- can make personal nodes having the groups or use ones someone else has
- published on the net.
-
- Now, as www works very well with dynamic node creation (which is the
- way the nntp and wais gateways work), to have a "virtual newsgroup"
- you would just instead of having a link to a "real" newsgroup in a www
- node have a link to a FIND node with suitable keywords, and then wais
- would be used to search the articles mathing the find criteria and
- would create a virtual node for the matches, like the nntp gateway
- currently creates a virtual node with the current contents of a real
- Usenet group.
-
- As the www news client / gateway already has the capability to follow
- links to earlier dicussions (References: field), following the tree
- from the virtual newsgroups would be easy. For more usability, the
- www / news gateway (or the news system) should also create forward
- references, ie. to backtrack the References field when new articles
- come in and thus keep track of articles which are comments to a
- certain article.
-
- To apply the same principles to other newsreaders, nntp should be
- extended to have the "newsgroup" instead be a "search criteria", which
- would be interpreted by the wais (or some other search engine) server
- and transparent to nntpd (except if it's the old-fashioned newsgroup
- name). People would have the search criteria - keywords from the
- text, poster names, whatever - in their .newsrc files alongside with
- the newsgroup names.
-
- I'm not sure how to keep track of what articles the user has already
- read, as there are no article numbers for the virtual groups. Keeping
- track of message IDs takes a lot of space. But even as a browsing
- tool it would be nice.
-
- Hmm, come to think of it to combine a wais server indexing the news
- database with the www / nntp gateway seems like the obvious thing to
- do, so somebody must have done it already?
-
- Also, are there any anonymous nntp servers which function as archives
- for some or all of the groups, ie have long-term storage available by
- nntp? CD-ROM online or something. With the www news gateway and some
- minor modifications for some purposes saving an interesting article to
- local disk would be unnecssary, instead just the message ID would be
- saved (or added to a node on an organized www document so one could
- find it later) and the article could later be found on a generic nntp
- archive. To save bandwidth and avoid single points of failure the
- nntp archive could be a distributed database with servers on various
- parts of the world and cooperation and caching between them - the
- servers could compute a hash from the message ID and archive a certain
- percentage of the article. With some coordination the burden of disk
- space could be shared so there needn't be one gigantic nntp archive.
-
- //Jyrki
-
-
