psychoceramics: instead of newsgroups

[dasher @ netcom.com (Anton Sherwood)]

Okay, at least two of you said yes, so here's my scheme
for a step toward making newsgroups - or at least the eternal
restructuring debates - obsolete.

My idea is to assign each user an Interest Vector, initialized
randomly to plus-or-minus epsilon in each of about sixteen
dimensions.  A longtime user's vector might look like this:

X-Interest-Vector: TE^N?XH`R]\D>VF_

(using the 94 printable characters `!' .. `~'; if that's not enough
resolution, use two).  Your newsreader computes the dotproduct of
your Interest Vector with that of each new article, and presents
the best matches first.  After you see an article you have the
option of rating it.  If you rate it high, your Interest Vector
moves nearer to the writer's; if you rate it low, you move away.

For a new user, of course, the "matches" computed are meaningless,
random - more so when all users are new.  But they should soon
sort themselves out into a roughly isotropic Big Bang.  Amorphous
galaxies appear, corresponding to clusters of newsgroups, and
slowly develop internal structure, which changes as threads grow
and die - without ever needing a vote.

Vector-filtering should be used in conjunction with thread selection.
If someone known to share some of my interests participates in a
thread that's otherwise beyond my filtering range, I may want to
read the rest of that thread; that shifts my Interest Vector, and
may in turn shift those who hang on _my_ every word ...

Thus, while users with narrow interests form tight clusters indifferent
to the outer universe, those with broader interests, by exerting their
"gravity" (positive and negative) on multiple clusters, define the
large-scale structure of this Sphere of Interests.

(I know this is off-charter, so if anyone wants to discuss it,
let's take it elsewhere)

Anton Sherwood   *\\*   +1 415 267 0685   *\\*   DAS--@n--.com