Also, since I'm not all that democratic, I'd like to see people who
tend to make more sense have more influence. If your posts get
high ratings, then your ratings of other posts count more.
A couple of years ago I heard about a news server that lets you
rate news items and then "learns" your preferences by comparing
your ratings with others'. If you tend to rate high the same items
that John Smith does, then you will automatically be sent anything
rated high by John Smith. I know that Pointcast and MSNBC let
you rate stories, but I don't know if they learn your preferences.
I think this is important because I don't have the same tastes as
the average person. I want crap like the Jerry Springer show
and Cosmopolitan etc filtered out for me.
I would like to see academic journals take this approach as well.
The main barrier to making research papers available online has
been refereeing. If you read a refereed journal, you can be assured
that the facts have been carefully checked, and you are not wasting
your time reading some crackpot theory. The refereeing process
has always been a good filter for academic literature. Unfortunately,
it is expensive, so journals can't make their papers freely available
online, even though the authors would love to have them freely
available.
Anyway, I think that the distinction between a research paper and
a post on a discussion list will continue to fade in the coming decades.
Automatic rating/refereeing will probably be incorporated into all kinds
of online public communication. If you say something online that
makes sense, it will get circulated, regardless of where you said it.
Make sense?
--Bill Haloupek haloupekb@uwstout.edu http://www.mscs.uwstout.edu/~billh/home.html