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You can now receive Internet-on-a-Disk by email, by signing up at Yahoo Groups. Either send email to subscribe-ioad@yahoogroups.com , or register at the Web site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ioad. You can also use that group to discuss related matters and share insights with other readers and with me (Richard Seltzer seltzer@samizdat.com).
http://www.samizdat.com/ Please note our new Web address.
NB -- Gutenberg has announced that they plan to release 32 new electronic texts per month in 1996.
Pointers to 13 Web sites devoted to the author of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
This is a set of pointers to public domain literature, software (source code), and graphics on the Internet. It points to sites that store public domain etexts, rather than to the individual texts themselves.
This is a new site and a new editor for the service started by Vonda McIntyre. Authors (many of them science fiction and fantasy authors) list here published books which they are selling directly themselves. In many cases these are out-of-print books which the authors have in their "basements." It's a great opportunity to get the email address of your favorite author and buy autographed copies of books simply and inexpensively.
This commercial publisher of electronic texts includes at its site an extensive list of pointers to other Electronic Book and Text Sites.
This directory is based on a form sent out by email once a year. They are compiling the 1996 edition now.
A hypertext list, with descriptive details, of all "known" anonymous ftp sites -- all 2588 of them. A number of these include etexts, but you'll have to do some hunting to identify them.
For those who do not have the capability or the time to retrieve electronic texts from the Internet, many are available at a nominal price from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK, a project of The Samizdat Express. Recent additions include the 1995 CIA World Factbook (3 disks) and Native American History (2 disks). For further information, send email to samizdat@samizdat.com or check our Web site http://www.samizdat.com/
This full-text search engine is available for use by all as a free service. While Yahoo is good for finding a site devoted to the topic you are interested in, you'd use Open Text to find words and phrases embedded in documents at Web sites. This kind of technology can make it easier to find what you are looking for on a Web site on the other side of the world than it is to find it on the hard disk on your own PC.
NB -- Another, even more powerful and capable search site -- Altavista from Digital Equipment -- was just announced as a free service . I've used it in beta mode and it typically found 3-10 times as many desired Web pages as Open Text did. And it also let me easily check to see what sites have hypertext links to mine -- over 140 of them.
This free electronic newsletter appears weekly, with a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers, educators, and others. In their December 1 issue they said, "Internet-on-a-Disk is frequently cited as one of the best resources for education and for the blind..."
This is our new address -- our "virtual" web site. We're still with the same Internet service provider (TIAC), but now we're paying $10 a month extra for the simpler/clearer address. We now have over 250 Web pages (documents), some of which include entire books, and yet we're using less than half of our allotment of 10 Mbytes of disk space. (You can pack a lot of useful information into a small Web site when you don't mess with graphics.) And for the curious, we've added counters to most of our pages, so you can see how many visitors have come by lately.
By the way, TIAC has changed its pricing structure so the Web space that comes with a SLIP account is no longer unconditionally free. If traffic to your pages exceeds 1 gigabyte in a given month, then you are assessed additional charges. I mention this because it indicates a trend which users of the Web should be aware of. Independent education-related sites which you click to may well be running on someone else's equipment and may face similar traffic-based charges. In our case, because we don't have graphics, our files are relatively small, and it would take tens of thousands of visitors per month to bring us to the level where we would be charged (5 to 10 times the traffic we get today). But as a good Internet citizen, you should remember that resources are not unlimited and what is free for you may not be so for someone else. As a rule of thumb, don't unnecessarily download or repeatedly reload huge files. Get what you want when you want it. But don't leave the faucet running when that's to no one's benefit.
A directory of successful Web sites, with details on how they do it. This is a pilot project that we are housing temporarily, until the number of entries and/or the volume of traffic becomes greater than we can handle. It now has 23 listings, including the Library of Congress, Marshall Industries, Navisoft, Fosters Daily Democrat, and TIAC. For info on how to get your site listed, check the Web site or send email to samizdat@samizdat.com and request results.txt.
Note new address of this useful lookup service.
Software/games designed to exercise your brain and measure its power. Tempting, but I haven't downloaded this stuff myself yet. If you try it, let me know what you think.
This site is interesting no so much for what it does as what it portends -- the ability to search across numerous on-line stores to find out who has what you want and who has the best price. This is purportedly "Your Intelligent Agent for Comparison Shopping." As of now, however, it only looks for rock and pop music CDs, and only checks 9 virtual dealers. When my 15-year-old son Michael tried using it to find a popular album, the response showed that three of the stores were blocking the BargainFinder's agents and there was some other kind of trouble with a fourth store. And for those it did search, it didn't find the album, even though some of the stores had it. So it doesn't look like this is ready for prime time, but the underlying idea is compelling.
While on-line gambling is an obvious application, I'd have never guessed that a government would be one of the first to do it in a big way. Liechtenstein's weekly pick of six numbers out of a total of 40 has a guaranteed jackpot of over $1 million, and is audited by Coopers and Lybrand. And you can enter with your Web browser, using your credit card. (Strangely, the background graphics are awful, making some pages hard to read.)
This is an essential, up-to-date reference resource, important for understanding and teaching about current events. Unfortunately, the Web server is very slow, so it may take a while to get what you want when you want it. If you have the time and inclination, you should download the entire text and keep it on your hard disk. If you don't have the time (it would probably take a minimum of three hours even at 3 AM), we are making the text available on three IBM/Macintosh diskettes as part of our PLEASE COPY THIS DISK collection.
Next March 14th, students across the U.S. will watch and participate as the Hubble Space Telescope performs astronomical observations which they themselves have helped design, as "Virtual Co-Investigators." On April 23, 1996 the raw data will be published, on-camera and on-line, again as part of a live national television broadcast, over public television in the US and NASA-TV. To find out more and to receive the latest information about the project, check their Web site or send email to: listmanager@quest.arc.nasa.gov and in the message body write these words: subscribe updates-hst
If your biology students have access to Macintoshes connected to the Internet and you would like to apply to the BioBLAST project, send your name and postal address via email to <apply-bioblast@cotf.edu>. You will be sent an application to join the BioBLAST project. The application deadline is December 15, 1995. Schools will be notified by January 15, 1996.
If you have questions, contact Laurie Ruberg by email at lruberg@cotf.edu or by phone at (304) 243-2388.
This Web page consists of an archive of LISTSERV email messages about free software, contests, conferences, training, and eduational Web sites. It's targeted at students, teachers, and parents.
The Voices of Youth Internet Project for the UN's World Summit for Social Development (Copenhagen March 6-12) received over 3000 messages from children and teenagers from 81 countries. Those messages are still available on-line at this site.
Another opportunity for K-12 classrooms to interact with scientists, engineers and support staff at NASA, the Galileo spacecraft mission to Jupiter will provide a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to be part of the flight team on a pioneering interplanetary expedition through the project. To participate, sign up for the mail list by sending an email message to listmanager@quest.arc.nasa.gov. In the message body, write only these words: subscribe updates-jup
Click on "New Hampshire Town Hall Forums" for info on how to register your class to participate in on-line discussions of topics related to the presidential election. This is just getting started.
This looks very interesting, but I haven't had a chance to seriously use it yet. Here you find documentation and software that can help you create professional-looking Web pages. This includes .html editors and graphic editors, as well as some of the fancier capabilities that I haven't used yet and need to learn -- like creating forms and CGI scripts. There's a place here where you can fill out a form and have a homepage created for you automatically "on-the-fly." And another "on-the-fly" application automatically creates forms and CGI scripts for you online. This deserves a closer look.
What RealAudio did or sound, VDOLive does for video with sound. Instead of the old Internet model, where you had to wait for an entire huge file to download before you began to hear or see the content, now the video and audio comes "streaming" to you in real-time. You hear it and see it as it arrives. The motion is dreadfully slow and even with very small image size the resolution is awful. But the fact that this can happen at all, and that it can be both entertaining and useful with a 14.4 modem is miraculous. (Keep in mind, that I've only seen this from the user's perspective, with the free Windows client I downloaded. I have no experience with the server software.)
I'm not a fair judge of this one. It's intended to perform the same functions as VDOLive, and perhaps it does so superbly when used with a very fast Internet connection. But with my little 14.4 it's virtually useless.
That seems to be changing. RealAudio (http://www.realaudio.com/) is easy to use, and the sites being created by their customers becoming increasingly tempting. And now VDOLive looks promising on the video side (http://www.vdolive.com/) . (See comments above).
VDOLive seems to have the same sound quality as RealAudio, only you see pictures too (cf. MTV).
RealAudio seems designed for pre-packaged content (with the neat feature that you can embed URLs in the audio stream and hence create slide shows or something analogous to the film strips that were used in schools back in the 1950s, with the pictures in synch with the sound).
VDOLive seems like it can be used for live broadcasts as well as later playbacks.
With RealAudio the emphasis is on the "real" as in "real-time" -- the fact that you start to hear the sound shortly after you click (not having to wait for the file to download). VDOLive is also "real-time," but the emphasis seems to be on "live." It looks like you have here the opportunity for live broadcast interviews, in addition to prepackaged content. With poor video resolution, this medium feels better suited for programming that looks live and spontaneous rather than edited and polished.
On the server side, RealAudio lets you set up the equivalent of a radio station, without a government license. Now, appearing on the market just a short while later, we see VDOLive providing the rudiments of what could let you set up your own basement television station. This would be tempting stuff to play with on the server side, if you could afford expensive toys.
But the "live" aspect also points toward important, business-related applications.
Surprisingly, two-way audio/video videoconferencing software isn't market-ready yet. CU-SeeMe from Cornell (ftp://gated.cornell.edu/pub/CU-SeeMe) is available with two-way video and audio for the Macintosh, and just video (no sound) for the PC. But it looks about as user-friendly as a Heath kit for building a bomber.
The promising features of VDOLive seem to indicate that clever compression techniques, line speed -- even at just 14.4 -- might not be the major barrier it looked like a year ago . In other words, we don't have to wait until nearly everyone has through ISDN lines or TV cable lines in order for useful videoconferencing to become widespread. And I'd be very surprised if we don't start seeing products of that kind from professional, commercial sources, rather than university labs, very soon.
When video and audio are live and two-way, they can serve as a means to extend the ways that people relate to one another, and they also can become very efficient means for communication -- conveying all the non-verbal information that is essential in negotiating and building relationships.
In Neal Stephenson's cult-classic novel Snow Crash, it is the ability to recreate subtleties of facial expression in "avatars" (on-line alter egos) that makes virtual/alternate reality take off.
I suspect that there will be three stages in the development of video for the Internet -- tied to developments in visual quality (resolution) and speed (frames per second). What we have now is little better than mailing somebody a still photo, or having a still photo on the screen while someone talks (for instance, with Internet Phone). Yes, there's a recognizable face, but there's no connection between the expression on that face and what the person is saying.
The first stage will probably be the achievement of natural-looking movement (through even greater compression or just widespread availability of high bandwidth at low cost), so gestures seem natural, and the person at the other end seems more like a human being than a poorly programmed robot.
Next will come the very high levels of resolution which are necessary to capture all the subtleties of human expression. (If we were going to be limited to today's speeds, I suspect that detailed analysis a myriad of facial expressions could lead to low-bandwidth approximations -- focusing on just those aspects of the face that seem to convey the most nformation about a person. But we won't be limited, and hence that kind of research isn't necessary.)
But the real winner -- the Holy Grail of personal videoconferencing -- will be eye contact. How do you (given that you have solved the above two issues) mount and synchronize the cameras to create the compelling illusion that you are looking someone in the eye and that person is staring right back at you? Then you will be able to communicate a full range of emotion, with all the associated messages of sincerity and credibility; and video over the Internet becomes a major, indispensable, business tool.
Probably not -- for a variety of reasons.
The main role of "the news" (newspapers and television) is not to inform, but rather to turn the raw stuff of life into story. The more random and senseless that raw stuff appears, the more the need for story.
Story consists of facts carefully selected from the random stream, organized so they have a beginning, middle and end, and creatively packaged to catch and hold your attention -- to entertain.
The Internet is an amazing resource for research. With the right search tools, you can find the facts and information you want very quickly. But facts do not compete with stories.
Between the lines, stories reassure us that there is order and meaning in the apparent chaos of everyday life, that ordinary acts and lives can and do matter.
Sharing such stories, sharing the experience of reading and watching them can be an important tribal/community experience.
And that common shared experience provides the raw material for conversation and social interaction.
So search engines on the Internet don't make professionally packaged news stories go away. Rather, the Internet provides new means for distributing/finding such stories so they can be more widely shared. And the Internet makes it possible for smaller sets of people (communities) to share the stories that matter to them and/or share the general stories in contexts of their own choosing.
Technology makes that culture possible. So technology is essential. But only those innovations which support the underlying culture and help extend it -- which fill fundamental human needs -- are likely to survive.
Life is self-propagating and evolves in adaptation to the exigencies of the physical world. Of the many possible mutations, only a few -- those that serve a useful purpose in the current environment -- survive, reproduce, and flourish.
To some extent technology, too, is self-propagating. If something can be invented, it probably will be. Technology also evolves, adapting to the exigencies of human life and culture. It's survival of the fittest; the law of the jungle; Darwin rules. Of the millions of possible innovations, only a handful will flourish and serve as the basis for further innovation.
So when making investments in technology, it is important to understand the implications for the human environment/culture. How will it be useful in the human context? And with regard to the Internet, in particular, I'd ask -- how will this innovation affect interactions among people? If it will let people connect to one another more completely and naturally or in ways that previously were previously impossible or awkward/difficult, that looks like a winner.
The part I saw included a video case study of Virtual Vineyards (http://www.virtualvin.com/). Harvard Business School professors John Sviokla and Jeffrey Rayport (http://marketspace.hbs.harvard.edu/) put the case into historical perspective and shed light on the extraordinary success of that Web site.
They spoke in terms of product, context, and infrastructure.
Consumers could buy these same premium wines at nearby stores. And the infrastructure (the Internet) was available to competitors as well. So the company's value to the customer comes primarily from the context -- the carefully constructed experience that they lead users through at their Web site, to help them understand, appreciate, select and purchase the wines they want. (Keep in mind that the presentation at the teleseminar was far richer and more compelling than my gleanings which I am summarizing here.)
While the presentation was compelling, I was left with an uneasy feeling that while what Virtual Vineyards is doing seems very right for now, and obviously works, it might not be a good business model for others to follow. At first, I couldn't articulate that uneasiness. Then, on the next day, I chanced on some interesting statistics about visits to my own little Web site and got some anecdotal feedback from a couple of readers on how they had navigated to my site.
Several months ago, I had posted an old article I had written about Halloween (http://www.samizdat.com/hallow.html ). And much to my surprise, over the couple weeks before Halloween that article got more visits than my home page. In fact, over the last few days before Halloween, it got three times as many visits as my home page. And some -- if not most -- of the unexpected visitors were surfing using search engines (like excite and opentext) and looking for references to Halloween.
What does that mean?
Efficient search engines which dive into the full text of Web sites are making "home pages" less relevant. People are finding what they want deep in the bowels of Web sites, without having to navigate the way the designer of the site intended.
In other words, once again, the Internet puts people in touch with what they want, the way they want it. Users create their own context, and blow right past the carefully constructed contexts that companies try to create for them. And this is barely the beginning...
The Internet went through a similar transition about a year ago, when the advent of Yahoo blew apart the concept of the virtual mall or on-ramp site. People no long needed an orderly, well-constructed context to find the site they wanted when they wanted it. With searches they could bounce from one site to the next, unaided by a mall designer.
The mall had been an attempt to construct a large controlled environment/context on the Internet that in some ways mimicked the environment of the old on-line services. For a few months, it looked like a brilliant idea; then overnight it was obsolete. Of course, it took a while before large companies realized it was obsolete. MCI and others started moving boldly in that deadend direction in the spring. That was when I wrote an article about the "associative power" of the Internet for Internet-on-a-Disk ("The Associative Power -- This Ain't Kansas, Mr. Broadcaster." You can find it at http://www.samizdat.com/kansas.html )
I believe that we are about to see that same phenomenon carried to a deeper level. Not only can users move smoothly from one site to another without aids and context; in the near future they will be able to go from pages deep inside one site to pages deep inside another, without the help of hardcoded hyperlinks.
Search engines, agents, and other tools that enable users to drill straight to what they want when they want it -- bypassing the carefully constructed contexts of sites like Virtual Vineyards -- will soon make that business model obsolete.
A year ago it was reasonable to assume that people navigating to and through a Web would start with the homepage. The number of hits on deeper pages was simply a subset of the hits on the home page (unless you went out of your way to publicize deeper layers as separate entities and encourage people to go there directly).
While we realized that users can come and go as they please, on a whim, we presumed that the structure/context of a Web site is important to hold the user there and to lead users through a controlled sequence of experiences and choices. (From what they said in the video, the people at Virtual Vineyards folks put a lot of effort into that level of page design).
But sophisticated search tools and agents blow that model away.
You cannot own/control the context. The encounter with the user will not be serial/sequential.
A site like Virtual Vineyards is doing all the right things for today. And they could be successful in the long term if they evolve as the Internet evolves. The risk is that they will put too much store in their current model because it works, and they will peg their future on their look-and-feel context approach.
I suspect that instead of Web-page-design context, they should focus on building audience, on interaction with and among users, on serving audience. In so far as Web-design context is a means to better serving the audience that's great. But they should stay alert to all the new ways that come along to do that -- rather than focusing just on the design.
Keep in mind that I am drawing sweeping conclusions from very limited evidence. On the other hand, when describing an alien landscape, it doesn't take too many data points to determine which way the gravity pulls. And there is no doubt that ever more sophisticated search tools are coming very soon.
So the analysis at the teleseminar of why Virtual Vineyards is successful today was excellent and right on target. But I suspect that that formula for success -- branding based on the context of a Web site -- is likely to be short-lived. And I wouldn't recommend that others try to follow in their footsteps.
Date: 29 Oct 95 18:01:00 -0500
I have only recently visited your www site and subscribed to your newsletter, but I already love it. I live in Joplin, Mo. and am the editor of our local computer clubs newsletter. We are looking for good articles and I was wondering if yours could be used. I'm also glad to share what few well written articles we publish (not that most are poorly written, but they are just few in number) Thanks for your support of the Joplin Computer Society and the Newsletter. My address is airick.west@f711.n286.z1.fidonet.org and I'd appreciate your help thanks again. TTGT (-;
-- REPLY -- You are welcome to use my articles from Internet-on-a-Disk in your printed newsletter, so long as you indicate the source, that you are using the material with our permission, and provide our URL and email address. (While it's freely available in electronic form, and can and should be forwarded and reposted, we want to keep track of what happens in print.) Richard Seltzer
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 16:15:39 +0800 (MYT)
I am a research worker in MARDI (Malaysian Agric. Research & Dev Institute). This is my first encounter with you. Keep up the good work. My own address is abrash@mardi.my
Best wishes from Malaysia
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 95 00:03:45 -800
Dear Mr Seltzer,
I am currently in my last year at Rowan College in New Jersey and in a Mass Media class I have been exposed to the book Future Shock. The professor of the class is a firm believer in Toffler and the end of the world through technology, and he is not the kind of professor who takes discussions from students about his beliefs since we are "just young kids who have not seen the world."
When I gave him your articles, Will the Real Tomorrowland.. and The Nostalgia of Tomorrowland, he was forced to consider the possibilities ... My professor has not changed his outlook, but at least now he listens to us.
Thank You
Dan Gaudette
P.S. I would be interested in anymore of your writings. Please tell me where on the net I may find them. Thanks
-- REPLY -- You'll find articles, stories and books of mine at our Web site http://www.samizdat.com/ . Thank you. Richard Seltzer
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 95 22:33:33 -0800
I am a fifteen year old girl and I still love to get [dressed] up [for Halloween]. I do agree with some of the points. It is a shame that people have fun contaminating candies for little kids. This year in my neighbourhood, few people participated. My family on the other hand went the whole nine yards. We purchased dry ice, hung sheet ghosts in the trees. Halloween can be salvaged but people have got to want the will. I plan to keep dressing up until the day I die. I hope you don't restrain your children, and mabye next year you could also be in costume. Genie? Lumberjack? Cloud?
-- REPLY -- I'm out there every year with the kids (but still haven't gotten into dressing up myself; maybe next year). My oldest, who was eight back when I wrote that article, is now a junior at Yale. But my youngest just turned six, so I've still got some good Halloween years ahead. Richard Seltzer
Date: 27-OCT-1995 13:54:32.60
[addressed to the editor of Internet World Magazine, neubarth@iw.com, cc: seltzer@ljo.dec.com]
Purchased your Nov '95 issue [Internet World]. Superb! Particularly the following:
1. PERSONAL TOUCH by Richard Seltzer. Mr. Seltzer hit the nail right on the head, I believe (and sincerely HOPE). The ethics and culture of the Net make it particularly unique. Although keeping commercialism out is untenable (and in many ways inappropriate), if the philosophy of help-first and give-more-than-you-take is maintained, the Net will remain a fun, free, and delightful world. ...
-- REPLY -- The full text of the article as it was originally submitted for publication is available at our Web site, "Building Communities on the Internet," http://www.samizdat.com/build.html
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 95 08:44:12 -0800
We have a full T-1 connection to the Internet with 273 workstations on line with 1,000 students having email addresses from 3 buildings on campus connected through 24 strand fiberoptics. We have 32 remote line access to the internet and to our network after school for community use and student use after 4:00. Our www address is wayne.esu1.k12.ne.us--give us a hit!
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 95 00:34:58 -0800
I would like to receive your newsletter at my above email address, and see what you have to offer. My name is Rick Vasen , live in the Netherlands (Holland), and was born in Australia, where I lived for the first 15 years of my life. I currently work at a museum in Leiden which you can see at their homepage at:
http://132.229.192.124/www.let.data/arthis/lakenhal/home.htm
Really liked your web pages !!!!!!
Thanks, bye.
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 95 15:19:00 0500
Hi Richard,
I attended your presentation at the Email Show [in Boston] yesterday and enjoyed it very much. I took lots of notes on suggested links and was able to find them all except for the on-line book about the internet/Web that you said was one of the best available on the subject. Could you give me the link for that?
Here is a page that I am working on which gives stories relating to creative thinking that you might enjoy. ...
http://www.quantumbooks.com/Creativity.html
-- REPLY -- The book is The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Guide to the Internet. It is available for free from their Web site http://www.eff.org (We also include it as one of the etexts on the disk Internet Reference #2, in our PLEASE COPY THIS DISK collection).
Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, West Roxbury, MA
02132. (203) 553-9925. seltzer@samizdat.com
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