[423] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Commercial services I'd like to see
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edward Vielmetti)
Sat Mar 23 05:05:17 1991
To: ddern@world.std.com (Daniel P Dern)
Cc: com-priv@uu.psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 22 Mar 91 09:45:38 -0500.
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 91 02:15:25 EST
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@ox.com>
Where are the good Chinese restaurants in town X,
and which ones serve dim sum.
how i would approach this.
first thing, this is probably something you can buy off the
shelf of your bookstore right now, or read in the restaurant
reviews of your favorite newspaper in the city in question.
all you need is a clipping service (which you can buy), a
scanner, and some kind of copyright arrangement. in the world
of ink on dead trees this is not that hard to do.
to extend into the network realm, what I would do would be to
train a "clipping service" on suitable netnews feeds (regional
.eats and .food newsgroups, or probably just all the news I could
find if you just care about "dim sum".) you'd also very much want
to tap into conferencing systems (ala well, world, freenet) which
have local discussions of strictly local interest; that would probably
get the most reliable or at least the most opinionated stream of
reviews.
armed with all this raw data and an appropriate full-text front
end a skilled user could probably find a reasonable place to eat,
or perhaps more importantly locate the right community to ask for
more details. remember, this isn't dialog or some kind of anonymous
faceless system, there are real users out there with real opinions,
and if you ask a question properly [*] you can get an enormous
amount of good answers back.
since this is a restaurant database the sensible spatial organization
is geographical (group the detroit/windsor restaurants together), and
within the geographic area by restaurant. you'd want a steamer full of
data for each restaurant, in one sense whatever you had (sketchy
directions, faxed menus, blurbs, reviews, etc.), in another sense a
very nice structured document which had all of the relevant information
in an easy to parse format. for each area a well-written, passionate
comparative review of all of the available restaurants, plus some
dissenting opinion, and maybe a discussion of who serves the best
of the various menu items. [**]
if you cared passionately about this question, it would be easy to
synthesize a new mailing list or newsgroup (dim-sum-lovers) [***] from
all the freely available discussion you could find. that would ensure
a steady stream of new information. If you were enterprising
editorially you could most likely find some ink and dead trees and
place the result on the shelf in your local bookstore.
I see the rest of the applications you describe (calendaring, maps,
road directions and transit info, nice pretty pictures) as quite doable,
and hopefully things you could purchase off the shelf and integrate
into a complete package, but more or less irrelevant to the question
per se. You really want good dim sum, even if the user interface is
dog-ugly ascii.
--
Msen Edward Vielmetti
/|--- moderator, comp.archives
emv@msen.com
the person who did this ENCOURAGED everyone else to download the document
- FARNET counsel
* I continue to be amazed at how few people phrase a question well.
There's a vast gap between the response from a nicely put query
and the typical nonsense on usenet.
** Wong's in Windsor (or possibly Ruby's) are the best places for dim sum
in the Detroit metro area. I don't recommend every item on the menu
though, unless you have acquired tastes. the server showed us this
red-colored interesting looking food, and when we asked what it
was the answer was "chikafee". Well, I wonder what that could be,
let's try it...hmmm. "chicken feet".
*** By synthesize I mean repost automatically or with little human
intervention articles and discussion from other groups into
a new derived group. Specifying the appropriate filters leaves
you with a group containing (e.g.) all of the dim sum discussion
or all of the Frame Relay discussion no matter where on the net
it was originally posted. the software that synthesizes the new
group keeps track of where things came from and arranges it that
you can participate in the original discussion even if you weren't
following it ordinarily. for instance a hypothetical dim-sum-lovers
group would contain this article.
