From: John Conover <john@email.johncon.com>
Subject: Re: Distributed by email?
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 1996 15:19:57 -0700
SullivanPa@aol.com writes:
>
> I've been on vacation for two weeks so I'm not sure if anyone replied to you
> about Good Morning Silicon Valley. In case they didn't, here's the answer:
> We're considering making GMSV available by e-mail but it's not a top priority
> at this moment. If we do, you can be sure that we will clearly promote it at
> our web site. Thanks for the query; I hope the service is useful to you.
>
Thanks, Patrica. What I was thinking about was to take the standard
news feeds, and run them through a program that does context searches,
for things like "Gingrich," "Clinton," etc. and adds an html link to
html://www.congress.gov, or html://www.whitehouse.gov so that a reader
could click on the name, and be connected to Gingrich's official,
congressional web page, etc. The same would be true for business
executives, corporations, etc. The programs that do this are
available, and I ran some experiments on the API news feed, and it
takes about 15 man seconds per article to format the article in
"pretty print," that is comparable with the text formatting
capabilities of browsers, like Netscape, etc. What this does is
automatically insert links to important things in the news so folks
will be web-surfing, without knowing it-possibly clicking on
advertisements for the latest announcements in the health industry,
(ie., press releases,) intermixed with medical findings from the
health page, etc.
One of the issues is that most folks read the news paper at the
breakfast table, in bed, or while occupied with their morning
constitutional, so laptops are really not convenient news distribution
agents. However, if the articles are ordered by by-line on a web
server, and the by-line, and a few sentence description of the article
are emailed to users, in customized order, with the html link to the
complete article, the user could pick-and-choose which articles are
read, ie., click on the by-line, and the browser fetches the entire
article, etc.
I was the VP of IT at a company, and ran a study on how much time
corporate executives spend on the computer. It is high, and could
possible be exploited as a news distribution media by, mechanically,
generating content customized news papers. Scanning the articles would
only take a few seconds/minutes to find those subjects of interest,
complete with links to the US budget, etc. Kind of the "Yahoo" of
dynamic information, as to the static information that is available
on the net.
John
--
John Conover, john@email.johncon.com, http://www.johncon.com/