Re: Discussions and Proposal

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <199807302235.SAA19782@typhoon.icd.teradyne.com>, lohner@typhoon.icd.teradyne.com writes:
>Roker (arma), Patrick (scoop) and I (CQ) had a quick discussion on IRC last 

typo in the first word of your post. thanks. ;)

>Why LNP?
>- --------
>  LNP will provide several advantages:
>a) faster than the current setup, because news will be in a standard format
>b) there will be more news overall
>c) news can easily be pre-sorted and filtered thanks to categorization
>d) it will reduce the load on moderators because they will have less news to 
>review each
>e) client sites can customize news for their target audience more easily
>f) there will be a centralized news source for linux

I would like to amend 'e' and 'f'. I was originally picturing that most of
the news server we know and love today would act as full news servers, even
if they didn't all display everything. That would mean we need fewer machines
overall. But I guess it doesn't matter if we have extra machines whose sole
duty is to provide a set of machines offering synchronized news. For 'f',
replacing 'centralized' with 'single' might help explain: there's a single
news source, but that news source is available in many different forms from
many different places. Wherever you get your news feed, it's still the same
news source.

But in any case, we all agreed that the thing to do first is to come up with
a suitable format for standardizing how to write down news. This will be
useful in its own right: it will allow us to categorize and share news.
After we've got a format on the way, we will need to figure out how we want
to do the actual sharing, but hopefully that will buy us some more time to
discuss/ponder.

The proposed format/categories look ok to me, but that isn't my field of
experience, given that I don't work with news articles on a daily basis the
way scoop or dave do.

--Roger