Subject: Re: CCL:How about a "Democratic" Chemistry WWW site...

From: Becker Oren <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 1995 13:41:04 +0200 (IST)

On Mon, 30 Jan 1995, Michael R Rothwell wrote:

> It will keep track of the number of accesses each link gets. It would then, for
> the Web Page, rank the links according to popularity, most popular first.
> New links would come in at the highest rank, and then slip downward (or perhaps
> not) as people evaluate them.
> Anyone could add a link.
> 

Wonderful idea!  I really think that a popular vote is all it takes. 
Go by the rule, if you don't like it don't read it!
Any censored version is clearly missing the spirit of THE NET.

Dr. Oren M. Becker
Dept. Chemical Physics
Tel Aviv University

---

From: Steven Schafer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 1995 11:37:08 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 30 Jan 1995, Michael R Rothwell wrote:

> It would not be too difficult to set up a WWW site here (at NCSU). My idea for i
> is:
> 
> Links which stay at the bottom of the list for more than a certain length of
> time would get deleted (taking out the garbage, so to speak).
> 
> The links would be divided into several sections, such as
> 
> "Software"
> "computational Chemistry"
> "Biochemistry"
> 
> or whatever.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> 
	I don't think this will work at all.  I know that when I find a good 
site I put it into my hotlist right away.  How are you going to account 
for my access, or the access of someone who found the link on What's New, 
or sci.chem, or the Computational Chemistry List?  I am all for private 
lists, but I think the main list should contain all lists, with maybe a 
top 10.  Who am I, or you, or anyone else for that matter to say which 
site should be accessible or not.  The complaint that departmental sites 
that only have faculty profiles are useless, is totaly absurd.  If you 
actually spend the time to look at the faculty profiles you may discover 
someone who is doing research in your field that you may want to 
contact.  Maybe there should be a list of ALL servers broken up into 
categories, Departments, Graduate Programs, Structure Information . . .
If you start putting links at the bottom of a list when they are under 
developement, they may never raise to the top even with massive 
modifications.

	Steven E. Schafer
	S.U.N.Y. Binghamton Chemistry Department
	http://chemiris.chem.binghamton.edu:8080
        Binghamton, New York  USA