Re: Newsgroup Signal to Noise Ratio

"paul c" <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac> wrote in message news:EYk_h.157503$aG1.18337_at_pd7urf3no...
> Frank Hamersley wrote:
> > David Cressey wrote:
> >
> >> Bob mentioned that the signal to noise ratio in this newsgroup is
> >> improving.
> >> I share that perception.
> >
> >
> > This true IMO ... however I am getting slightly cheesed off by long
> > multi threaded posts - not that I was previously blameless.
> >
> > Whilst I am a confirmed "bottom poster" I hanker for 1 quote + 1
> > response in 30 or so lines max.
> >
> > Yeah yeah - its very 21st century (gnats attention span) even though I
> > am notionally a boomer but I like the fast aquisition by leaning on the
> > downarrow rather than having to page down to find the meat 'n potatoes.
> >
> > Cheers, Frank.
>
> I suspect gnats are more observant than humans - they need to be in
> order to survive.
>
> I'd like to highlight an OP sentence, then press a key for my reply and
> have other keys to "unstack" fragments of a thread and never scroll at
> all. I don't think html quite grasped that possibility.
>

Why not think a little more radically? What I'd like is to peruse the existing posts in "hypertext form". That is, instead of linking one post to another post, (the "response relationship") the way Google groups or MS Outlook does, why not have a hyperlink in the specific word or phrase that elicited a response? Then, people interested in that particular continuation of the thread could click on the link, while the rest of us continued reading in sequence?

I see several problems with this. One is whether you want the responder to be able to indicate what word or phrase should lead to the response. The second is that hyperlinks are forward links, while the existing response relationship is implemented by back links. Back links are a whole lot easier to manage in a distributed fashion, because you can add a back link without modifying the original.

Another problem is that I can't see how to implement the "what's new" feature.... one that I depend on just about every time I visit a newsgroup.

None of these problems is a showstopper, however. Received on Thu May 03 2007 - 15:39:14 CEST