Minutes for San Diego news reader interface BOF

[Eliot Lear]

Apparently, my message didn't make it to far, so here it is again.

Let me just quickly mention that there was a hypercard Mac news
reader demonstrated at the BOF done by some folks from Dartmouth.

If you are interested in furthering discussion on this topic, there
is a mailing list.  Please contact me for more info.

USENET BOF summary

Our goal at the BOF was to stimulate conversation among the community
in areas of improving user interfaces to the large amounts of
information available to USENET readers.

The idea of the discussion tree was raised, and while this wasn't a new
idea, no reader implements the idea to its fullest benefits.

HP had a strong showing with a number of good ideas.  Jim Davis raised the
concept of arbitrary review, where individuals could mark a message good or
bad, and others could select messages based on that information.

Jeff Okamoto proposed investigation of a standard set of low level
calls to the news databases, such as getarticleby*, and others.  Along
these same lines, Larry Wall mentioned the idea of adding similar
functionality to PERL.

Keyword based systems also were mentioned during the night.  Dave
Taylor brought out the idea of a standard set of keywords for each
group generated by some form of textual analysis.  While the hair on
Erik's neck was raised, he did not become overly violent when
``keywords'' were mentioned.

Speaking of keywords, there was a small calling for a change in the
newsgroup paradigm.  Larry Wall mentioned that he would want to
implement a more general selection mechanism, ie one that would select
on arbitrary keys (headers, et al).  Others argued for such notions as
FLEXGROUPS, as dubbed by Eric Raymond in his code.

And there was, once again, a call for moderation sparked by Spaf and
Rich McGill.

Attendence was very good.  Erik and I would like to thank all those
who attended and gave input.  Next time, we'll ask for a bigger room.
-- 
Eliot Lear
[lear at net.bio.net]