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Pastimes : Silicon Investor ThinkTank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Busby who wrote (988)	4/3/2000 7:00:00 PM
From: levy	Respond to of 3372

The si site over at NDB has some features that we have wanted here such...their portfolio manager has alerts on stock prices and there are alerts for when a news item for a stock is new...quite frankly since all of si is available over there plus I can have the above features from ndb there too it is enticing to perhaps just stay there...thing is the ndb site has no way to add stuff to the menu bar from what I can see.....is that correct?.....if I could get netsearch over there at NDB and could figure out how to remember my very obtuse account number which is necessary for every damn time you sign on well I might just stay there....and would that be good or bad for SI if people used that SI as apposed to am I allowed to say real SI or I better say new SI as I believe real si may have some other meaning to some.

To: John Busby who wrote (988)	4/3/2000 8:08:00 PM
From: Pareto	Respond to of 3372

Re: Forum categories John, please take your time to restructure this one very well. Imagine you run a small library with 1.000 books. You know more or less where these books are, so organizing is not so important. But with time your library starts growing. You're not the only one using it. Many students are looking for books....and they don't find them. SI has 30.000 threads. Many of them are like books covered with dust. They get lost over time. Users only look into the most recent ones. So what you need to do is to hire one with good library skills. Take all the threads like a database. Index all the threads with as many as possible fields. Create dimensions. Then create query forms for users to review existing threads. Allow users to maintain their own structure of forum categories. Like personal portfolios. Each of us have our own preferences how to structure the threads. You might suggest some defaults. Index fields might be: company ticker, businesses, industries (allow multiple inputs for companies like microsoft), industry groups, nationality of company, company name, investment status (private, ipo, publicly traded), date thread started, thread started by whom, total number of posts on thread, date last post, language used on the thread (prepare for an international SI). Microsoft is a webdevelopment company, a database company, a office software company. It falls in multiple categories. So depending on the type of query a user makes, other listings come up. I made the suggestion of Looksmart, but you might want to add other industry schemes. That allows to link to outside industry information. Now the focus for outside links in on investment information and company news. With a well defined industry structure you could expand into an industry information resource center: What is happening in the semiconductor industry. Which companies are active in this sector? If you have structure of indexes, we might ask you to allow us to view the hot sectors. You could list all industries and see the number of threads and posts per range of time. That is interesting investment information. SI has been managed as an infrastructure where users or outside sources deliver the content. I would say that time has come that SI needs some help of organizing and structure. Users won't take the time to index a new thread in all the right categories, let alone index all existing threads. You might as well think how to structure the non-investment threads. The message board technology is useful in many areas. Now these discussions are limited to the coffee shop, you could give them a higher status creating broad groups like sports, politics, science or art. A perfect area for application is travel, where you have many potential revenue sources like hotel reservations and airfares. (I'm just thinking like an gnet investor) It takes some to stay ahead of the competition..... Regards, Pareto