The Fishwrap personalized news system

Fishwrap is an experimental electronic newspaper system available at MIT. Fishwrap attempts to address the needs of the freshman integrating into the MIT community. Fishwrap attempts this by balancing an individual's desire for personalization with the need to participate and know about the world at large. This paper describes the scope of the experiment, the underlying technology, and the evaluation by participants. Access to Fishwrap's personalized news system appears as a World Wide Web (WWW) hypertext link. This link calls upon programs to subscribe the individual to the news service. At this time an individual access password is provided. After the initial session students can get Fishwrap from any computer connected to the MIT network with a WWW browser.