[9078] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
sleaze
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Wed Dec 15 21:47:32 1993
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 21:45:21 -0500
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: raisch@internet.com
Cc: francis@avalle.insoft.com, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: "Rob Raisch, The Internet Company"'s message of Wed, 15 Dec 1993 14:47:10 -0800 (PST) <Pine.3.85.9312151204.A15354-0100000@hmmm>
In the case of kids I don't think it's *that* huge a job to filter
some newsgroups, tho it's a real job, not a hobby, not something I'd
just want to tell a staff person oh hi we have another new hat for
you, best of luck.
I mean, it's not like your average 12 year old is going to be
encouraged to spend 12 hrs a day reading newsgroups (nor do they
usually read all that fast or voraciously yet, tho some do.)
Or, put more succintly, say they get 100 or so msgs/day, 10 in each of
10 "special" newsgroups. But all reasonably readable (i.e. the mere
noise we'all skip past quickly is minimized.)
And some other stuff just between kids controlled by either only local
posts or only posts between like-controlled systems that perhaps is
monitored a little more lightly, maybe even have the kids help monitor
that area.
Ok, so some kid runs out everything, SO WHAT? Not the end of the
(ahem) big round thing you see when you look down. Go watch some TV or
torture ants like the other kids ya nerdy little rug rat :-)
It'd probably take over an hour a day, probably two or three, for a
kid to go thru what a reasonably tuned adult can sift and forward in a
day's work given a reasonably rich source (e.g. k12.*, maybe some TV
show and movie groups, some wire service stuff, things like comp.risks
which already are carefully moderated, etc.)
With some thought to segregating things (captive environment,
different news spool, tight control over who and where submissions can
come from, none of these are ideas very foreign to the current usenet
software) I suspect it could be done. BUT let's not kid ourselves,
it's work, someone has to sit down every day and do it!
So my offer:
If there's someone out there who believes themselves qualified, what
that means I'm not sure but I guess I'd like to see something, and
would like to try to think about setting up something like I describe
on World and sell it on a subscription basis to sites I invite them to
A) Speak to me about it and B) If it works out we'll subscribe to the
service.
I'm not sure what a fair price is, but I suspect it wouldn't take more
than several customers like me to earn a fair salary, expenses
(assuming you're a local dial-in to the net) are probably almost zero,
all sweat equity as far as I can see, and set-up which might take a
coupla months (there are some issues about software control etc) could
all be done w/o leaving yer day job, tho I think once launched it'd be
a full-time activity but hey, either sites sign up or not, you'd have
some idea at that point. I suppose if I'm providing all the computing,
disk, network and other resources I'd have to think about that, but
let's not let that be a block to get started.
Most of it can no doubt be done once on one site and distributed, with
perhaps some cruising on other sites via telnet to make sure things
are in order. It wouldn't be hard to set up an access group/account
for the person so they can delete messages and so on. A kind of
meta-administrator for one very specific area.
Fair enough? I've thrown down the gauntlet (or did I butter my bread?)
Note: I even have some private and public high school contacts around
MA that I talk with that I suspect would love to be guinea pigs in
such a venture, tho I think that would not be a problem anyhow.
-Barry Shein
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