From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/5125 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: bmiller@cs.umn.edu (Brad Miller) Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Announce: The GroupLens Trial Date: 14 Feb 1996 12:58:10 -0600 Organization: UMN Sender: bmiller@cs.umn.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by tm-edit 7.43) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035145771 31871 80.91.224.250 (20 Oct 2002 20:29:31 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 20:29:31 +0000 (UTC) Return-Path: ding-request@ifi.uio.no Original-Received: from ifi.uio.no (ifi.uio.no [129.240.64.2]) by miranova.com (8.7.3/8.6.9) with SMTP id LAA12476 for ; Wed, 14 Feb 1996 11:45:16 -0800 Original-Received: from maud.ifi.uio.no (0@maud.ifi.uio.no [129.240.74.2]) by ifi.uio.no with ESMTP (8.6.11/ifi2.4) id for ; Wed, 14 Feb 1996 20:01:03 +0100 Original-Received: from mail.cs.umn.edu (mail.cs.umn.edu [128.101.149.1]) by maud.ifi.uio.no ; Wed, 14 Feb 1996 20:01:00 +0100 Original-Received: from twain.cs.umn.edu (bmiller@twain.cs.umn.edu [160.94.227.147]) by mail.cs.umn.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id NAA22488 for ; Wed, 14 Feb 1996 13:00:39 -0600 Original-Received: (bmiller@localhost) by twain.cs.umn.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) id MAA06175; Wed, 14 Feb 1996 12:58:15 -0600 Original-To: "(ding) GNUS Mailing List" Original-Lines: 117 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:5125 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:5125 Are you tired of all the junk on Usenet these days? Be part of a project that could change the face of USENET! Here's your chance to help make USENET useful again. ---------------- What is GroupLens? ---------------- In a nutshell, GroupLens is a collaborative filtering system that helps you work together with other people to find the quality news articles out of the huge volume of news articles generated every day. To accomplish this the GroupLens system combines your opinions about articles you have already read with the opinions of others who have done likewise and gives you a personalized prediction for each unread news article. The prediction is on a scale from 1-5, and indicates to you how likely you are to find the article useful. I am Brad Miller, a graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. I have been working on GroupLens as my thesis project with professors John Riedl and Joe Konstan, and our collaborators Paul Resnick of MIT, and David Maltz of CMU.. We have been working on GroupLens for two years, and are ready to run a test of the system involving 10,000 users. For much more information, or to sign-up, please visit our web page at http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens ---------------- Why should *I* use GroupLens? ---------------- Because Usenet doesn't work any more! Too many people posting too much junk have clogged the net. But, "put simply, Usenet is the largest information utility in existence" [Harley Hahn,"A Student's Guide to UNIX"]! We each need help selecting the nuggets of useful information from the muddy sluice of the Net. GroupLens is a filter that identifies the high quality articles that will be of interest to *you*. The more users we get the better GroupLens works! We have been testing the system for several weeks with about 25 users, but are now ready to add many more. With 25 users we are getting good results, but in high volume newsgroups we need more people. The more users, the less we each need to read to be sure we're discovering all the good stuff! ---------------- Hey! It's easy, and fun ---------------- We have tried to make GroupLens as easy to use and as unobtrusive as possible. In all cases the number of extra keystrokes you need to type in order to rate news articles is zero or one! In return you get predictions from GroupLens that tell you how good an article is. But what about PRIVACY? GroupLens lets you choose your own pseudonym for your ratings and predictions. Noone -- not even the GroupLens servers -- knows who "SpacemanSpiff" *really* is. You can also subscribe to the GroupLens mailing list by sending mail to grouplens-request@cs.umn.edu. This list is for general discussion about GroupLens, and may be helpful. ---------------- What is the Future of GroupLens? ---------------- ---------------- What is the Future of Usenet? ---------------- We are currently running GroupLens on a few groups with just 10,000 lucky people, to collect data on the best collaborative filtering methods for figuring out which news you like to read. After a two to three month test period, we plan to give away our software so GroupLens can run for as many people, and on as many newsgroups as possible. GroupLens has the potential to shape the future of the Internet! This is your chance to help shape that future. ---------------- To Join ---------------- Get the GroupLens version of one of the following news readers [or modify your favorite reader -- see footnote 1]: - gnus-5 under emacs or xemacs - tin - xrn Join as a GroupLens member to read and rate news articles in one or more of the following groups [or propose your favorite groups -- see footnote 2]: - comp.lang.c++ - comp.os.linux.* - mn.general - comp.groupware - rec.humor - rec.food.recipes - rec.arts.movies (1) We tried to choose newsreaders with a large user base. On the other hand, if there is another newsreader that you think should be on the list maybe you'd like to get to know the GroupLens client library! The client library does most of the work needed to add GroupLens support to any newsreader. We are particularly interested in finding a windows based newsreader, if you know of a good, popular newsreader for windows, and we can get the source code, let us know! (2) Due to space and resource limitations, we cannot support everybody's favorite newsgroup. On the other hand, we'd like to have a small set of newsgroups with wide appeal. Let us know if there is a particular newsgroup for which you would especially like to use GroupLens. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brad Miller | e-mail: bmiller@cs.umn.edu University of Minnesota | phone: (612) 626-8396 Department of Computer Science | www: http://www.cs.umn.edu/~bmiller EE/CS 5-244 | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------