Re: Some Questions to Xanadu

[Andrew Pam <xanni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, May 31, 1998 at 04:14:49PM +0200, Soeren Grenzdoerffer wrote:
> > I would be glad to help, and would also be very interested to see your
> > paper!
> 
> If I'm ready I can mail it to you. But it's only in german and my
> english is to bad to translate it.

That's OK, my German is probably good enough to understand most of it.

> But is there not the danger that different gouverments ban Xanadu
> because such topics (and I don't think about small countries but
> countries like USA or the coutries of Europa. (OK. I know only the
> discussion about that in germany but I can imagine that the discussion
> is in other countries too.))

There are already some countries that ban or severely restrict use of
the Internet; there is no simple solution to this problem.  We believe
that most countries that want to participate in the world information
economy will have to come to grips with these issues sooner or later.
Anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can already publish,
transmit and exchange any information they wish quite undetectably with
military-strength public-key encryption and steganography software.

> IMO is 'junk-information' small pages to a topic which are linked to a
> big document, but has only a small phrase, a Link and a small picture on
> it (e.g.'I like Ted Nelson and his Xanadu-System', a Link to xanadu.net
> and a small picture of Ted Nelson). No big information, but if you're
> searching something about the topic you find that link you can follow.

That's a perfect example of the subjective definition of "junk".  A page
like that actually conveys plenty of useful information; both that you
individually like Ted, and it also contributes to overall statistics
about his popularity (see the Sucks-vs-Rules meters).  You just need
good search algorithms that would assign such a page an appropriately
low relevancy when doing a retrieval for information on Ted.  That is
a completely different field, and one in which there is much good work!

Cheers,
	*** Xanni ***
-- 
mailto:xanni@xxxxxxxxxx                         Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.net/xanadu/                   Technical VP, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/                   Technical Editor, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/sc/                   Manager, Serious Cybernetics
P.O. Box 26, East Melbourne VIC 8002 Australia  Phone +61 3 96511511