>What type of maneuvering are you thinking of - a parallel to wandering
>thru the public library, looking for something to read, or going to the
>library to find a specific book that you want?
here is what I have been kind of toying with mentally. people want to
approach the net from the point of view of their *interests* often
coinciding with their *occupation*. now, when anyone who is anyone can
build up their list of favorite references, and people can find those
reference pages easily, we have a very outstanding system that is
essentially very close to what FAQs are today, but *not quite*. the
entrance requirements for FAQs are kind of high. I want to make it as
easy to create Pointer Pages as it is to do an anonymous FTP.
Here is an example. I wrote the Internet Writing Resource Guide as a
FAQ. now any writers can just try to find my FAQ, and *boom* they are
off and running. All good FAQs are like that-- they appeal to some
subset of interests, but point out everything in cyberspace that is
tangential to them.
notice, however, that we don't have a very good way for people to
maneuver through cyberspace based on their *interests*. look at all the
premier technology, and how tedious it is to find good information:
1. ftp -- archie lets you find a file based on a given name. what am I
going to do, look for `writing' and get 1,000,000 files spread out over
all over cyberspace? and the interface is so clumsy.
2. mailing lists-- how do I find one that I am interested in? if I even
find the Lists of LIsts, I have to wade through a massive
alphabetical listing where lists that appeal to me as a say,
programmer, are littered and spread out over many pages. I have to read
the whole thing or do a hit or miss text search.
3. Newsgroups -- again, how do I find something that interests me? cat
.newsrc | grep "interest" -- pretty hit or miss. the newsgroups that I
might have *died* for are spread out all over, and I may stumble onto
them only by *accident*.
4. Gopher -- a little better. But still, trying to find the `master
writing document' is difficult. I can still do a veronica search and
get 1,000,000 pointers.
We need a *ratings server* that sorts popular resources by their
*accesses* so that people can traverse cyberspace based on the most
*popular* resources. I want to go to a server, and say, `I am
interested in writing', and it would return in sorted order the most
popular net resources on that topic, and I could browse them all via
hypertext links. Veronica is *close* but it doesn't *sort the search
results* based on `value criteria' (the best of which, IMHO, is `how
much this was accessed by others'). this is why ratings are so
important! they help people find what other people have found already!
And notice that really a good FAQ, the kind that is a `pointer to other
information' is often nothing but a big list of all the resources in
cyberspace that are tangential to that interest, in the categories
above. We need to *formalize* this process whereby people with a
certain *interest* can find information relevant to that *interest* and
a ratings server (tightly coupled with a populist FAQlike hypertext
infrastructure) is foremost among these.
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