the Interest Pointer Page

L. Detweiler (ld231782@longs.lance.colostate.edu)
Sun, 06 Feb 94 19:42:41 -0700

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OK, here is a slight elaboration on what I am thinking about. Many of
my FAQs, and many FAQs in general, simply reformulate existing net
resources from the perspective of a certain interest. Earlier I gave
the example of writing: I put together a FAQ that describes all the
(known) relevant resources in Cyberspace to Writing:

1. Email addresses of magazines
2. FTP Sites
3. Newsgroups
4. Mailing lists

Notice that these four resources are pretty much general to *any*
interest. E.g. if I am an Xwindow programmer, I would like to go to the
XWindow Programming FAQ and find (1) email addresses of relevant people
that can help (2) FTP sites with the stuff I want (3) Newsgroups
dedicated to the same subject (4) tangential mailing lists, and any
other stuff in Cyberspace.

So now imagine that we create a IPP server-- a server for Interest
Pointer Pages. Anyone who has an `interest' can submit a pointer page
that attempts to cover everything on the Net in that `area'. And people
can browse by *interest*. Note that Usenet, in many ways, is an attempt
to do this already, but this concept, in essence, represents a sort of
combination between Hypertext and Bulletin Boards.

I propose that the server have *keywords* for interests that can be
*arbitary*. These will tend to stabilize into basic `buzzwords' by the
choice of the FAQ authors. We could even have `synonym' dictionaries
that return a list of keywords related to a given keyword.

Notice, moreover, that these `keywords' will begin to take on a life of
their own. People could begin to label *everything* -- mailing lists,
posts, mail, etc. with these keywords so that people who are writing
the IPPs can find relevant items! and we could even have ranking
systems based on the keywords! imagine how easy it would be to write
(or at least experiment with) intelligent agents if all net resources
had a sort of `standardization' in `keywords', e.g. `concept covered',
and `pointers to other similar resources'?

in fact, IPPs could even be generated *automatically* by these agents.
Maybe a PIPP is a `periodic interest pointer page' -- it recompiles
itself every few weeks or so to find new popular resources, throw out
old ones, update changes in addresses etc.! Isn't that the essence of
what everyone thinks an `intelligent agent' would do?

Now, *this* is how I would like to traverse cyberspace. What do you say?

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