> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of J. van Baardwijk
[snip]
> >If you want to play with the messages in MySQL, ftp them to me (the new
> >machine, when it's up) and I'll get them into MySQL. If you
> like what you
> >find, then you can decide if you want to do the same thing
> locally. If so,
> >I'll help, possibly in far more interesting ways that you might imagine.
>
> Oh! Now you got me curious! Tell me more! :-)
As I'm working on this stuff, I'm trying to architect it with a distributed
system in mind. In reality, there are as many "archives" of a mailing list
as their are people who subscribe and keep the old messages. It would be
very cool to be able to leverage that. But it would be difficult to do so
in any sort of direct fashion, keeping people's e-mail clients secure. But
I'd like to construct a system that exchanges not only the messages, but any
kind of ratings or analysis that they care to perform. For example, my
system does a bunch of message traffic analysis and comes up with various
scores for messages and participants. Someone else might do linguistic
analysis, or the same thing as I do, but with different algorithms. It
would be wonderful if we could exchange those automatically, creating a
distributed network. Thus, we wouldn't have to rely on Yahoo or
mail-archive.org or any other single point of archiving.
The trick will be to make it very easy to set up, which means allowing
people to continue to use their existing e-mail clients while also using
them as gatherers for the message data.
So, as a step in that direction, what I hope to get to one of these days is
an XML feed of some sort for the data in my archive. Then if you wanted to
publish your own archive, you could simply point it at my feed and then
rearrange the data however suits you. And one would hope that you would
also share. In short, Napster for on-line discussions, with a lot of
intelligence. Sean Parker, who wrote much of Napster, got involved with my
old company for exactly this idea. He saw that some of the best information
about music was in mailing lists that generated too much traffic to read
through... so some kind of evolutionary system in which the "best" messages
(according to various points of view) would bubble up, so to speak.
To clarify a bit more... your archive might have a completely different set
of "best" messages than mine, even though they're from the same source.
Your selections might be based entirely on your own ratings, or you might
choose to "subscribe" to others opinions and allow them to influence how
things are displayed on your site. Some interesting feedback loops become
possible, potentially creating a fairly intelligent network of
message-passing and evaluating.
Nick
