From akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu Sun Mar 21 15:19:10 1999 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id PAA44900 for ; Sun, 21 Mar 1999 15:19:10 -0800 Received: from darwin.helios.nd.edu (darwin.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.114]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id PAA31203 for ; Sun, 21 Mar 1999 15:19:09 -0800 Received: (from akriman@localhost) by darwin.helios.nd.edu (8.9.2/8.9.2) id SAA24197 for classics@u.washington.edu; Sun, 21 Mar 1999 18:19:08 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 18:19:08 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred M Kriman Message-Id: <199903212319.SAA24197@darwin.helios.nd.edu> To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Tilting and listing In the never-ending search for thankless, labor-intensive internet activity, David Meadows has finally hit on what could, with care, become the most bottomless and frustrating waste of his considerable talents, and possibly a sufficient vent for his prodigious energies: > ... I was wondering if folks would find a proscription > list of such sites to be a useful thing -- what I'm thinking about is a > page where 'bad' sites (from an information point of view) were listed with > the idea of providing a place where students might do an initial check of > something that some search engine has turned up. I do not doubt that this would be useful. If DM or anyone else wants to do it, I certainly would not object. I even volunteer one of my own pages [[1]] for immediate proscription (I welcome the free advertising). Even if it were not useful -- yea, even unto counterproductiveness -- the intense visceral joy of seeing garbage forthrightly and boldly condemned would have me standing, cheering, and hugging my monitor. Get to it! However, if even the somewhat austere page [[2]] (justly) condemned by DM counts as ``slickly packaged,'' the task looks endless. There are, of course, a number of web resources that try to direct surfers to the better quality of site (miningco.com does something like this; magellan did it but was sold, eventually to excite.com; northernlight.com used to do more, most of the major search engines tend to make implicit, often deranged quality judgements -- yahoo.com more, altavista and hotbot less than average). The common feature is that all such efforts are directed at guiding surfers toward the good sites, rather than at keeping them away from the bad sites. It seems like the only practical approach -- the garbage keeps coming. [FWIW, google.com tries to base its automated quality assessments on the number of links from other webpages, so any links to bad work will have the counterproductive effect of increasing its rank there.] For an example of a good condemnatory page, see _Petronius Arbiter, Time Traveller_ [[3]], which takes arms against just the tiny inland sea of troublesome bogus quotes ``We trained hard ...'' attributed to * Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C. * Petronius Arbiter - Greek Navy - 210 BC * Petronius, 100 BC * Petronii Arbitri Satyricon, A.D. 66, attributed to Gaius Petronius, a Roman General who later committed suicide. * Gains Petronius Arbiter in the 1st Century A.D.' * Calus Petronius Arbiter (1st Century, BC) * Petronius Arbiter, 201 B.C. * Gaius Petronius, Centurian, Rome, 1st Century * Petronius Arbiter, ?? AD * Petronius Arbiter, 60 A.D. * Petronius Arbiter, about AD 30 * Gaius Petronius, 65 AD * Petronius Satyricon, First Century AD * Petronius Arbiter, 1st Century, Satyricum * Galus Petronius, AD 57 * Petronius (256 B.C.) * Petronius the Elder, 1st Century A.D. * 210 BC by Petronius the Arbiter * Petronius Arbiter. 210 vor Christus (I'm glad to see that the question of the existence of a possibly distinct Titus Petronius has evidently been decided in the negative.) (Not to be confused with Petroleum V. Nasby.) [[1]] http://wings.buffalo.edu/SBF/bald.aliens.html [[2]] http://interoz.com/egypt/who/index.htm [[3]] http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/petronius.html .