Version 1.5 of The Online World book's Chapter
12 has a new section called "Using email gateways to Internet resources".
This is a dear topic to me. The text contains tricks that has saved me a
lot of time. Actually, it let me do things that I could not have done in
other ways.
 The most important discovery
is The Stanford Netnews Filtering Service. It lets me search through
a very large number of Usenet newsgroups each day for the occurrence of selected
keywords, and have the results delivered to my mailbox. (Editor's note: This
service was later taken over by
Reference.COM.)
The following top level
newsgroups are currently covered: DU, ca, general, ont, trial, air, can,
gnu, out.going, triangle, alt, ieee, rec, tx, atl, comp, in.coming, sci,
ucb, aus, control, info, scruz, uk, ba, csd, junk, soc, vmsnet, bionet, ee,
misc, su, za, bit, fj, ne, talk, biz, fl, news, test
I have used the filtering
service since the 4th of April in connection with these applications:
[1] To track mentions of The Online World handbook on Usenet. Since I assume
that the book is often referred to by also giving my name, I use the search
term 'presno'. (I fear that the search term 'the online world' is too general,
and will result in too many irrelevant hits.) The filtering service is set
to give me daily reports.
[2] As the project director of KIDLINK,
a large grassroots network promoting a global dialog between youth through
15 years of age, I want to track the search term 'kidlink'. The filtering
service is set to give me a report every three days.
[3] Finally, I track the usage of raw ginger used for treatment of
my wife's kidney disease. It is widely used in China,
and some other Asian countries to help with kidney problems. I simply wants
to learn more. The search term is 'ginger'.
Subscribing for regular searches
These services were set up by email to mailto:netnews@db.stanford.edu (Defunct.
Today, please check Reference.COM for revised instructions). I put the following
set of commands in the _text_ of my mails, and sent one mail per subscription.
subscribe Presno
period 1
The "period 1" means that I want daily reports.
subscribe kidlink
period 3
subscribe ginger
period 3
The search profiles are like queries in WAIS, i.e., plain English text (no
boolean AND, OR, NOTs). I have tried to get more details on how the search
engine works, but without success. The only thing that I know, besides the
results that I get, is what they say: "After you receive useful articles,
you can feed them back to the service to improve your profile."
You can also subscribe
by World Wide Web using the URL given above.
I have tried this using
the Lynx WWW browser, but find the email method quicker, safer, and easier
for me.
These simple search terms
are used by the Filtering service to search all netnews articles in
newsgroups available to the Stanford news host. We are talking BIG numbers
here. On a typical day in December, 1993, 43,000 news articles were posted
on Usenet representing some 81 megabytes!
All articles that match
my profiles (based on content, regardless of which newsgroups they fall into)
will be mailed me. Here is a recent example from my 'kidlink' subscription:
Subscription 2
Article: comp.sys.mac.comm.31195
Message-ID: <1994May29.0609.244@afterlife.ncsc.mil>
From: jpcampb@afterlife.ncsc.mil (Joe Campbell)
Subject: How to install NinjaTerm/Terminal
on US Mac? (English)
Score: 80
Lines: 44
First 20 lines:
Please excuse my posting in English. I hope that
you can help me. NinjaTerm or Terminal were
recommended to me by the KIDLINK coordinator in
Japan. I'm attempting to use one of them for our
5th grade students to communicate over KIDLINK-J
with students in Japan. This is my first attempt
to set up a computer (Macintosh LC-III) to be
Japanese compatible and I'd be most grateful if
you could answer a few questions and offer any
advise:
1) Is 0.98vx the current version of NinjaTerm and
2.2-J1-0.0.11 the current version of Terminal?
If not, can you tell me how to get them?
2) Does NinjaTerm have the capability to store
telephone numbers and execute scripts?
(Terminal appears to have this capability, but
I haven't figured it out yet.)
3) On a US Mac, what is required to operate
NinjaTerm or Terminal (I assume fonts are
required; I could install Apple's Japanese
Language Kit - I think that KanjiTalk would be
difficult for us because
Article: comp.sys.mac.comm.31225
Message-ID: <2sb1j3$jt6@mudraker.mtholyoke.edu>
From: matsuda@mtholyoke.edu (Takeshi Ken Matsuda)
Subject: Re: How to install NinjaTerm/Terminal on
US Mac? (English)
Score: 76
Lines: 70
First 20 lines:
Joe Campbell (jpcampb@afterlife.ncsc.mil) wrote:
> Please excuse my posting in English. I hope
> that you can help me. NinjaTerm or Terminal
> were recommended to me by the KIDLINK
> coordinator in Japan. I'm attempting to use one
> of them for our 5th grade students to communicate
> over KIDLINK-J with students in Japan. This is
> my first attempt to set up a computer (Macintosh
> LC-III) to be Japanese compatible and I'd be most
> grateful if you could answer a few questions and
> offer any advise:
>
> 1) Is 0.98vx the current version of NinjaTerm and
> 2.2-J1-0.0.11 the current version of Terminal?
> If not, can you tell me how to get them?
>
My version of NinjaTerm is 97a4. Could you tell *me*
where you obtained 0.98vx? Also, I once tried
Terminal, but that was 2.1x. Would you post where
you obtained the above-mentioned version?
Notice the line starting with "Score." The number decreases as the probability
of this being a good hit decreases (based on what you have fed back to the
service). I have a threshold on the number of hits that I want with each
report. The ones with the lowest score numbers are just cut off.
The first hit above has
these two lines:
Lines: 44
First 20 lines:
This means that the service is set _only_ to give me the first 20 lines of
each found message. If I want the full text, then I must send a message back
to netnews containing this command:
get comp.sys.mac.comm.31195
If you wait a couple of days before sending the command, the message may
not available any longer. This has happened to me.
Ad hoc searches
You can also do ad hoc searches through the filtering service. For example,
to search for articles related to "information filtering," send an email
message to the service containing the following command in the TEXT of your
mail:
search information filtering
I would have enjoyed knowing how many days' worth of news articles that such
commands are searching, but this information seems not to be available.
A while ago, I was writing
an article about net sources of information for local area network managers.
Using search words like 'banyan', I was able to quickly find many good references
and examples.
While this search command
is nice to have, I personally find it less useful than the subscription service.
After all, there are so many other sources of information, both on CD-ROM
(like Computer Select from Ziff-Davis), and online.
Conclusion
I am very satisfied with the The Stanford Netnews Filtering Service. The
term 'kidlink' is so unique that I just get what I want. The term 'presno'
has given a few strange messages in Bulgarian, but the hit rate must be 99
percent or more.
With the term 'ginger'
it is different. Several people have Ginger as a name (the search is not
case sensitive), there are internet hosts with ginger in the address, thus
giving me irrelevant hits, and ginger is used in so many applications ranging
from cooking, a cure for sea sickness, and does also regularly appear in
newsgroups about pets (animals).
I have therefore regularly
fed useful articles back to the service to improve my search profile on ginger.
You can retrieve instructions
on the email interface to the service by sending a message with the word
"help" in the message body the service. I keep a copy on my disk for reference.
Actually, the gist of the instructions have been incorporated in my
communications scripts. When I write a message to the filtering service,
a short help text pops up to remind me what to do.
There is a companion service
at elib@cs.stanford.edu for filtering
computer science technical reports. A search server is also available at
URL http://elib.stanford.edu/.
The Online World Monitor newsletter
The newsletter and the book were companions. While the book describes
the online world as it is, the newsletter tracked changes. It could more
freely focus on selected offerings or phenomena than could be done within
the strict framework of the book.
Bulletin 1 had the following
contents:
-
The batch approach to networking.
-
Spotlight on important developments.
-
Pointers to Interesting conferences, newsgroups, and resources
-
Tracking Changes, - or sic transit gloria mundi.
For more about the newsletter, see
monitor.html
KIDLINK: http://www.kidlink.org
Feel free to redistribute as long as the text remains intact as it appears
here (including this paragraph). Permission to quote/excerpt/reference in
other media is hereby granted, so long as cited material is identified as
coming from The Online World Monitor newsletter. For any other use, contact
the author for permission. |
