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Curious technology -- free translation for Japanese Chinese and Korean
Articles --
Have you ever experienced the frustration of clicking again and again and again within a Web site to get to information that you know is there? Many shopping sites, are set up so you need to guess the right deparment or section before you can find anything -- a maze that you have to fight your way through to get to the merchandise you want. Other sites seem deliberately set up to force you to click many times, take you from one limited set of choices to another to another -- forcibly guiding you step by step, and putting the maximum number of ads in front of you before you get to what you want. I avoid such sites. I don't have the time to waste on them.
At my own site, my aim is to make it easy for visitors to get to whatever they want with a minimum of clicks. In fact, unless I've blundered, you should be able to get from any page to any other page in just two clicks.
To make this possible I have a comprehensive sitemap page, with links to all the hundreds of pages at my site. (It would take over 60 pieces of paper to print out that "page".)
Basically, a sitemap should be the table of contents for your site. If you have a couple dozen pages or less, your home page can and should serve as your sitemap. But if you have more pages than that, you should build a separate sitemap page.
A sitemap is a hyperlinked list of each and every file at your site, consisting of the titles of the pages and whatever other info you'd like to include, organized by subject/category. Keep it simple -- without graphics or distractions. The folks who choose to use a sitemap typically know what they want and want to get there with a minimum of hassle.
You should link to your sitemap from all your pages. Then from any page at your site, anyone can quickly go to the sitemap and then go to any other page at the site in just one more click.
Your sitemap can also help search engine crawlers find all the pages at your site quickly, meaning that you will be better represented in search engine indexes and hence get more traffic. Just submit your sitemap page instead of your home page at all the search engines. (NB -- Search engine crawlers typically do not check every page at your site. They presume that the pages you link to directly from the page you submit are more important than ones several clicks away. Different crawlers stop automatically at different depths. NB -- Lycos says they only go one level down. "The Lycos spider will try to travel through links contained in the webpage you submit. A good rule of thumb is to count on the spider traveling down one level from the page you submit." By submitting your sitemap page -- with links to all your pages -- you should get maximum coverage.)
No matter how large your site is, you should make every effort to keep your sitemap complete and up to date and to include all the necessary information and links on a single page. If your site is large, you should organize your sitemap by category, and at the top of the page list your major headings with internal links to those portions of the page. Keep it simple.
Remember your aim isn't to keep your visitors at your site for a long time, but rather to help them get what they want quickly and effectively, so they'll to come back again and again.
AltaVista Fill in the form for free inclusion in the main index, which also serves as the index for the no-frills search site Raging Search,www.raging.com) You can add more than one page -- going back to add new ones as you create them. You have a choice of paying $199 for inclusion in the LookSmart Directory, but that isn't necessary. AltaVista is by far the most powerful and precise search engine -- the preferred tool of professional researchers. They also have started selling "sponsored" link placement through GoTo. When searchers enter clueless one-word queries, at the top of their page of results they see these "sponsored" matches, in a different color, followed by real matches. If you are interested in bidding on words for this placement (both in AltaVista and other search engines that are partnering with GoTo) check this link.
Google This no-frills site is also the search engine for Yahoo. Over a third of the page views at my site come by way of Google. This site archives the Web pages it indexes, so if a page goes away you can still retrieve it from Google.
Alltheweb (AKA Fast Search) No frills and a very large index.
Northernlight In addition to the Web, this site also indexes its own private collection of articles which are for sale.
Excite This search engine includes "fuzzy logic" and a thesaurus so it can provide you with relevant results even when you aren't precise about what you are looking for. This link takes you to the submission form for free inclusion in their index. Like AltaVista, they also offer paid submission to the LookSmart Directory.
Hotbot This search engine (and many others as well) uses Inktomi for its index. Submit here and you should eventually be included on all search sites powered by Inktomi.
Lycos Now owned by the same company that owns Hotbot, Lycos has its own separate search index. While that index seems to be relatively small, they advertise a lot and hence are well known.
DirectHit These folks specialize is ranking based on "popularity." In addition to running their own search site, they also provide services to other search sites, helping them to add "popularity" to their mix of ranking criteria.
The above are all "search engines". For a discussion of the difference between search engines and directories see my article at http://www.samizdat.com/dir.htmlYahoo, Open Directory, and LookSmart are all directories.
"Search engines" not worth bothering to submit to:
www.iwon.com and search.msn.com They use Looksmart for their directory and Inktomi for for their index. If you submit to Hotbot, you'll eventually get into their Inktomi index.
aolsearch.aol.com Not really a search engine, they use the Open Directory
http://www.webcrawler.com/ = Excite
www.snap.com Owned by NCBi. You have to pay to be listed there.
http://www.goto.com/ You have to pay to be listed here. Advertisers bid for keywords.
http://www.scourtheweb.com/ Uses the GoTo which is paid.
http://www.findwhat.com/ You have to pay to be listed here. As with GoTo, advertisers bid for keywords.
Infoseek Used to be one of my favorites. Now owned by Go.com, they now try to get you to pay for listing. Their "basic" service, which is still free, includes no guarantee that they'll add the pages you submit, and requires you to fill out a long form with spam-style contact information.
In my own experience (just over a year of DSL with Acunet), DSL turned out to be no where near as simple and reliable as I had thought. First, it took over two months to get the service installed, with service people from the phone company, Harvard Net, and Acunet all having to come to the house. Then, over the course of the next year, the service crashed about half a dozen times, with resulting confusion about which of those three companies was responsible, and with chain-of-command delays in addressing the problems. And twice changes made in routers or servers downstream (not under the control of Acunet, Harvard Net, or the phone company) disrupted my ability to connect to important Web sites that used encryption (such as my bank). The first time that problem lasted for over a month before Acunet's support folks were able to diagnose the problem and do something about it. (That took considerable creativity and persistence on their part. In the meantime, I could connect to most of the Web, but not to half a dozen sites which were very important to me.)
Finally, in December 2000, I was informed by Acunet that Harvard Net was going out of the DSL business, and hence, Acunet would no longer offer DSL. I had just six weeks to find another Internet access provider.
Fortunately, Cable Vision of Boston had recently upgraded to digital service in my neighborhood of Boston (West Roxbury), and was offering high-speed Internet access with free installation and for just $19.95/month (for the first six months, and $39.95 thereafter). This compared quite favorably to the $79.95 I was paying Acunet, but I wouldn't have made the switch (with all the hassle and uncertainty) if I hadn't been forced to leave Acunet.
Much to my surprise, Cable Vision was able to do the installation within three days of when I made the call. The service is fast, and seems to be reliable, and service people appear to be available to answer questions by phone and online at most times.
The one major drawback so far has related to connecting more than one PC to the service.
When I had DSL with Acunet, I had five static IP addresses and hence could easily connect up to four PCs through a hub and simultaneously connect to the Internet through all of them. Sometimes I'd have just two computers connected (desktop and laptop). And when my son Mike came home from college, it was a simple matter to connect his PC. And when my other kids, Bob and Heather, came home; or when business associates visited, I could hook them up with no hassle and no expense.
With cable-modem service through Cable Vision, I have dynamic IP addressing, which makes it difficult or expensive to connect multiple computers.
Apparently, the level of difficulty and expense depends very much on the specific set up of the particular cable company. I have heard that the setup is very easy with Media One, which services the Boston-area suburbs. In that case, you need to buy a router (for about $200), and can then set up so the router takes care of the addressing problems and also provides firewall-like protection from intruders.
With Cable Vision of Boston (which outsources much of its Internet service to home.excite.com), you must either set up one of your computers as a server (a rather complex task, if you are not technically knowledgeable) or you must pay a monthly fee of about $7 to get additional addresses for each of your additional PCs, and then you can use a hub to connect all your PCs to the Internet. Since that approach does not provide any protection from intruders, you also then need to buy/install some kind of personal firewall. (DSL, apparently, does not have the same risks with respect to intrusion).
As I called around, checking the alternatives, I was surprised to find that both Cable Vision and Verizon (the new name of our regional phone company, and a DSL provider) refused to provide any help with regard to home networking. They both indicated that it was possible to connect more than one computer to their service, but wouldn't say how, and wouldn't provide support, and wouldn't even recommend local people who could help with such an installation. Fortunately, the online help at home.excite.com did step me through the process of signing up for additional IP addresses, and that was all I needed to know for that particular setup. But the language of that "help" was worded to discourage the average home user from trying it. And they definitely don't want business customers.
There were a few other unexpected limitations involved in getting this particular cable-modem service. Every computer you are going to connect has to be a Pentium 233 MHz or above, with 32 megs or more or RAM. And installation involves installing Microsoft's IE browser (120 megs) in an annoying version branded by home.excite.com
On the plus side, Cable Vision's implementation does not require the use of a phone line (as some cable-modem services do).
When I called, Verizon offered their "infospeed DSL" service for $39.95 for 64 kbit/90 kbit (down and up speeds) -- which didn't sound much better than connecting by 56 kbit modem. If you wanted decent speed (1.6 mbit/90 kbit), the service cost a very pricey $99.95/month. Like Cable Vision, they use dynamic IP addressing, which makes it complicated to connect more than one PC. They indicated that could be done by setting up a local area network, with one of your PCs serving as a proxy server (a complicated process for which they would provide no help). Also, every computer to be connected to the service had to be a Pentium 166 MHz or above. They promised installation within 15 business days.
I also checked flashcom.com for DSL, because they have been advertising heavily in our area. But they quoted 6-8 weeks for installation.
So now I'm with Cable Vision of Boston. The connection is noticeably faster than DSL (but no big deal). And I'm going to have to pay about $7 extra per month for each computer that I add (and I no longer have the flexibility I had with DSL of adding a computer or two when one of my kids or a business associate is visiting). And I need a firewall as well. But overall, I'm quite pleased with the new service, and feel that I am quite fortunate to be in an area where cable Internet service is available.
(Perhaps I spoke too soon. This morning, Jan. 2, 2001, a major server went down, shutting off cable access in the northeastern US for hours.)
The basic problem is how to cope with rapidly changing and discontinously changing business conditions.
The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen deals in particular with instances of "disruptive" technological change. Large successful companies organize to optimize the success they were built on -- focusing on the technology that gave them an important competitive edge, developing improvements in that technology ("sustaining technology"), and setting up all functions to meet the expressed needs of the customers they have attracted. As a result they set themselves up to be blindsided by new technology that takes a very different approach, and that their customers are asking for. The new technology, typically, enters the marketplace in a no frills form -- low cost, with very little functionality -- that doesn't appeal to the megacompany's customers. But if it finds a niche where it can thrive -- typically, a new application that the megacompany is ignoring because the market is too small -- by the ordinary evolution of computer technology, later generations of this same product/service will become ever more powerful and ever more feature rich, and pre-existing applications and customers will migrate to it in hordes.
"... in the cases of well-managed firms such as those cited above [Sears, Digital, Xerox, IBM, Apple], good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stay atop their industries. precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership." (p. xv)
The post mortem diagnosis is truly excellent, providing historical insight for those of us who used to work for those companies (I was at Digital/Compaq for 19 years). The irony is reassuring -- the more successfull and better managed the company was, the more vulnerable it was to unexpected threats of this kind.
But this book is far less convincing as a predictive tool for investors and as a guide for managers who wish to avoid the collapse of a large successful company or who wish to take advantage of a new disruptive technology to build a new large successful company. There are simply too many variables to try to control. And so much of what is recommended runs counter to human nature.
In Living on the Fault Line, Geoffrey Moore frequently refers to The Innovators Dilemma and tries to deal with the practical question of how companies can survive and thrive in such a bizarre environment. He begins with the intriguing proposition that in the past most instances of disruptive technological change affected high tech industries, and meant nothing to managers in traditional industries. (Christiensen's examples from the retail and construction equipment industries were exceptions, and took a far longer time to play out than the high tech examples. And the fruit fly example -- the one where change was fastest and easiest to study and understand -- was the computer storage industry.) Moore points out that today, the disruptive technology of the Internet is rapidly impacting all industries, and hence everyone needs to become familiar with the dangers and the possible cures of this dilemma.
He does a great job of explaining the stock market's valuation of Internet companies, making it seem quite reasonable that startups that have never made a profit should have multi-billion-dollar market caps. But this book was published early in 2000, before the dot-com crash; and the author would probably write that chapter very differently today.
In other words, like Christensen, Moore is great at analyzing the past, and making sense out of what seems random or even insane. But the manager or investor who relies on this analysis to make predictions or course corrections is at great risk, because in the normal swirling flow of complex events, it is quite difficult to perceive which of the eddies and currents will prove to be important later. Also, as the book progresses, rather than providing fresh analysis of the bizarre new phenomena of Internet business, Moore keeps falling back on the models that he described in his earlier books -- Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, as if his concepts have greater longevity than the business world he applies them to.
So I come away from these books not with a greater ability to predict the unpredictable or to manage the unmanageable, but rather with a tragic image of today's business world. Managers and workers at all levels are faced with rapidly changing and bewildering business conditions. You spend much of your life at work, but because of the rapidity of change and the likelihood that the companies for which you work won't last long, that work sometimes feels stripped of meaning.
To be motivated and to feel proud of what you do, you need to shift your perspective -- to no longer invest your sense of personal worth in the success or failure of the companies you work for. You need to focus on what you can understand and control -- the projects you work on, the teams you work with. And you need to realize that if you meet your daily challenges, accomplishing what you set out to do, despite the odds against you, you should feel proud, regardless of whether the projects you work on ever reach the marketplace or the company succeeds or fails with it. You are what you do, and that remains, regardless of long-range consequences beyond your control.
I also come away with a curiosity regarding the history of nations. The concept of corporate culture derived from that of national and ethnic culture. Now it would be interesting to take what has been learned about corporate culture and apply those principles to the understanding of national culture. What happens to nations when they are faced with disruptive technological change -- comparing Japan and China (as Jonathan Spense does to some degree in his book The Search for Modern China, and as Ruth Benedict touches upon in her brilliant WWII-era The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), and also looking at Russia both at the end of the 19th century and the end of the 20th century. What enables the people of one country to adapt and thrive, while the people of another country seem to collapse in bewilderment when faced with rapid, unexpected change? And how and why does that capability change over time?
You can buy these books at Amazon.com: The Innovators Dilemma, Living on the Fault Line
You can also buy these related books there: Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Search for Modern China, The Chysanthemum and the Sword, and The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama
Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer
Adding dozens of new titles every month, Gutenberg has over 3100 etexts available for free over the Internet. These include classic works of literature and history, as well as out-of-print and little-known works by great authors. If you can, connect by ftp, rather than the Web, to get the most recent ones. Here's a list of those recently added, alphabetized by author. The file name is useful for fetching the text from the ftp site. Unless otherwise noted, the directory is the one for 2002. Text for earlier years are corrected editions. Many of these texts are available now or will be soon on diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK for those who cannot get them themselves. For the current catalog, check http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html.
Carl Becker -- The Eve of the Revolution, A Chronicle of the Breach with England (teotr10.txt)
Thornton Burgess -- The Burgess Bird Book for Children (bbbfc10.txt)
Joseph Butler -- Human Nature and Other Sermons (hmntr10.txt)
Charles Darwin -- Volcanic Islands (vlcis10.txt)
Arthur Conan Doyle --
The Hound of the Baskervilles (bskrv10a.txt)
The Great Boer War (gboer10.txt)
Anna Katharine Green -- The Golden Slipper (gslpr10.txt)
H. Rider Haggard --
The Wanderer's Necklace (ncklc10.txt)
Beatrice (betrc10.txt)
Red Eve (rdeve10.txt)
Thomas Hardy --
A Changed Man and Other Tales (chgmn10.txt)
Wessex Tales (westl10.txt)
Two on a Tower (twtwr10.txt)
Homer -- The Iliad, trans. Andrew Lang (iliab10.txt)
William Dean Howells -- An Open-Eyed Conspiracy (opney10.txt)
Archer Hulbert -- The Paths of Inland Commerce (tpoic10.txt)
Henry James -- The Author of Beltraffio (atblf10.txt)
Jerome K. Jerome -- Idle Ideas in 1905 (idlid10.txt)
Charles Kingsley --
Froude's History of England (frdhe10.txt)
Sir Walter Raleigh and His Times (srwal10.txt)
Plays and Puritans (plpur10.txt)
Andrew Lang -- Ballads in Blue China (blchn10.txt)
James Legge -- The Chinese Classics (Prolegomena) (lputf10.txt)
Joseph C. Lincoln -- The Rise of Roscoe Paine (trorp10.txt)
Walter de la Mare -- The Return (rturn10.txt)
Guy de Maupassant -- Complete Short Stories (gm00v10.txt)
John McElroy -- Andersonville (andvl10.txt)
William Morris --
Wood Beyond the World (wbydw10.txt)
Signs of Change (sgnch10.txt)
Ralph Paine -- The Old Merchant Marine, A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors (mrmrn10.txt)
Plutarch -- Works Volume 3: Essays and Miscellanies (pluta10.txt)
John Reed -- Ten Days That Shook the World (10daz10.txt)
Constance Skinner -- Pioneers of the Old Southwest (potsw10.txt)
Bram Stoker -- The Lady of the Shroud (ldsrd10.txt)
Aug. Thebaud -- Irish Race in the Past and the Present (irish10.txt)
Jules Vernes -- Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (800lg10.txt)
Charles Dudley Warner --
That Fortune (cwfrt10.txt)
The Golden House (cwgld10.txt)
Little Journey in the World (cwljw10.txt)
Their Pilgrimage (cwpil10.txt)
Washington Irving (cwirv10.txt)
Kate Douglas Wiggin --
Marm Lisa (mrmls10.txt)
A Village Stradivarius (vllst10.txt)
A Summer in a Canyon: a California Story (smcan10.txt)
George Wrong -- The Conquest of New France, A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars (confr10.txt)
Charlotte Yonge -- The Dove in the Eagle's Nest (dvegn10.txt)
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