User:Sj/coralline

(link from user:sj/internal)

It is common for a shared thought to reach the wrong audience. Either too few people, or too many, or simply the right people in the wrong context. (for instance, reaching a close friend with a piece of important information conveyed via a high-traffic list may result in its being filtered for much later review, rather than heard/read immediately).

It is also common for it to be difficult to set up preferences for receiving new ideas. Either because the process of choosing a subset of 100 mailing lists is difficult, or because the details of updating that many distinct profiels or away-states is hard, or because there are actually 15 different types of services, groups, and tools all sending out messages.

One step towards resolution

A coralline system:

Here is an octopus-broadcasting system in line with principles that capture and preserve the intent of the creator[1]:

• Define messages in terms of the type of service/site they come from (email, trac, wiki edits, &c), their originator, and a set of tags describing their content / context / originating intent.
• Define recipient profiles (similar to mailing list user preferences) according to what tags and tag-sets a recipient wants to find out about, and how aggressively updates are desired. (for instance : all topics related to XMPP and Sugar should be flagged in weekly summary-format for online review; all topics from or to Zdenek related to languages or dictionaries should be sent in their entirety without delay.)
• Automatically produce tags for each current named mailing list.

  automatically produce from-foo tags for senders? an advantage here would be defining the equivalence class of addresses which belong to a single sender and unifying their tags.

Some interesting features

• Support drawing in tags from external sources. Define a few privileged prefixes. For instance x-TAG could indicate a tag that came from some outside repository -- two different messages with that tag could have been tagged in different contexts. So x-library could apply to both book libraries, code libraries, and other ideas or terms referred to on some site with that name.
• Extract entries
• Handle replies effectively : figure out how likely it is that the originator of a message

footnotes

[1] see related thoughts here.