cgutjahr wrote:
I'm one of the Aminet admins. I did not discusss this with the rest of the team yet, but personally I like the idea of making a 'safe' backup of the Amiga related Usenet groups.
I am very glad to hear from you. Thanks for taking the time to answer!!!
It should be noted though that if Aminet is going to carry these backups, it will be most likely in the form of ZIP archives (like one ZIP per year and group for example) or something like that. We certainly lack the manpower to implement anything resembling dejanews'/google's comfortable web interface - not to mention the fact that such a web interface would require hosting half a million postings as individual text files.
Understood. I am thinking that the important thing at present is just to safeguard the Usenet postings at at least one other site besides google to assure their preservation. Once that is done, I'd be happy to offer my assistance in maintaining the collection. We may in fact not wish to put too much effort into a search facility, at least not right away if ever. We don't want to give Google the impression that we intend to offer some sort of "competition". We simply want to assure the preservation of our collective creation and history. It is also probably very important not to ask for anything too current. I would suggest the period from 1994-2000 or thereabouts, and a small number of the best newsgroups. I spent some time sifting through a large list of UseNet Amiga newsgroups to find the ones which met the following criteria:
1. a real amiga newsgroup, not spam infested
2. significant technological or creative information important to the history of the Amiga could be obtained
3. the primary posting language was English. There are a number of very good groups in other languages e.g. Italian, Russian, German, but these are less likely to be widely useful to non-native speakers
A select list of newsgroups like this will make the preservation much more manageable. I'll PM the list to you if you have an interest.
Of course, once the postings are available from Aminet, a third party could use the data to implement a web interface or similar things.
I agree that the best approach would be to approach google stressing the 'non-profit organisation' concept of Aminet. Any further suggestions?
I will work on coming up with ideas on this. I think it would be important to emphasize any university connection Aminet may have if possible. We want to avoid giving Google the impression we are a small club or local user's group. Large corporations can be very reluctant to deal with such. We should also emphasize the historical preservation aspect of what we wish to do here. We do not want to give them the impression that we want to make a profit, we simply wish to preserve the history we as the Amiga community have created and made available for Google to use.
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Oh, and could somebody supply me with a contact adress for google? Somehow neither IB nor AWeb will let me visit the original google.com site, I always end up on the German version (despite following the link "google.com in English").
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Google apparently uses the characteristics of your IP address to redirect you to the google site it thinks appropriate for your location. If you have cookies on, you can override this by using the following url:
http://www.google.com/ncrGoogle prefers to be contacted by web form or email. Contact information is available at the following url:
http://www.google.com/intl/en_extra/contact/search.htmlThe google support group is also available at the following url:
http://groups.google.com/group/google.public.support.generalI am also registered with the Google web api development program. I am thinking of raising this and related issues there and see what comes of it.
No one there has recently raised the issue of making the Web API available to Google groups. Recent emphasis there has been primarily on "Page Ranking" algorithms. This might be a very good time to remind people of Google groups.
