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[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From decvax!yale-comix!hawley at Berkeley Tue Nov 10 04:13:04 1981
Subject: speedier news perusal

The volume of news distributed is increasing, and is already
a problem for some.

This letter is directed to a common complaint: "it takes too long 
for joe hacker to sift through the huge pile of news".

Need for screen-oriented "news":
    One part of the problem is that the "news" program (and "mail",
    for that matter) is basically "article-at-a-time", forcing the reader 
    to drudge through the list of items in a linear order.  
    It's pretty easy to improve on this; simply write a screen-oriented
    version of "news": the user views a set of one-line titles/headlines 
    (pref. sorted by time and topic/newsgroup) and picks out articles 
    worth reading, not unlike reading a paper.  
    If screen editors on Unix were more "directory based", this problem would,
    in large measure, already be solved.  The job of news viewing 
    could be done from within the editor.

Improving selection of news items:
    Another harder part of the problem is in the criterion used to 
    select items for perusal -- the "subscription" list.
    The user may want a more precise way of narrowing down the huge
    list of stories, something more key-based, a la: "show me all the 
    news articles which contain these phrases: phrase1, phrase2...".
    This is just a big "grep" problem; however, it requires >very< 
    judicious selection of key phrases on the part of the user.

    Of course, the pile of news items received by a system can also be
    well-pruned at that level (ie, before users ever see it); this may
    sometimes be desirable.

    As for "digestifying" daily news, well, it would be nice,
    but that's a big and dirty job, and one which still must be done by
    qualified human editors.


I just started work on a screen-oriented "news" for myself,
and would be interested in anyone else's efforts.
If this is a "hot" topic, I will be happy to collect and release
other opinions on the issue; just send me the mail --

	M. Hawley  (decvax!yale-comix!hawley)