Seamless Web
| by Sam Vaknin | August 18, 2003 | |
The Internet started off as a purely American phenomenon and seemed to perpetuate the fast-emerging dominance of the English language. A negligible minority of web sites were in other languages. |
Bright Planet, Deep Web
| by Sam Vaknin | August 18, 2003 |
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www.allwatchers.com and www.allreaders.com are web sites in the sense that a file is downloaded to the user's browser when he or she surfs to these addresses. |
The Fall and Fall of the P-Zine
| by Sam Vaknin | August 17, 2003 | |
The circulation of print magazines has declined precipitously in the last 24 months. This dissolution of subscriber bases has accelerated dramatically as economic recession set in. But a diminishing wealth effect is only partly to blame. |
The Idea of Reference
| by Sam Vaknin | August 16, 2003 | |
There is no source of reference remotely as authoritative as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.There is no brand as venerable and as veteran as this mammoth labour of knowledge and ideas established in 1768. |
The Affair of the Vanishing Content
| by Sam Vaknin | August 16, 2003 | |
"Digitized information, especially on the Internet, has such rapid turnover these days that total loss is the norm. Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed it may have become too amnesiac already to notice the problem properly." |
Jamaican OverDrive - LCD's i LDC's
| by Sam Vaknin | August 15, 2003 | |
OverDrive - an e-commerce, software conversion and e-publishing applications leader - has just expanded an e-book technology centre by adding 200 e-book editors. |
Deja Googled
| by Sam Vaknin | August 14, 2003 | |
The Internet may have started as the fervent brainchild of DARPA, the US defence agency - but it quickly evolved into a network of computers at the service of a community. |
The Future of Electronic Publishing
| by Sam Vaknin | August 14, 2003 |
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UNESCO's somewhat arbitrary definition of "book" is: "Non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers". The emergence of electronic publishing was supposed to change all that. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken place in the last few months. |
The In-Credible Web
| by Sam Vaknin | August 14, 2003 | |
People are conditioned to trust written words, not to mention images. "I read it in the paper" or "As seen on TV" are worn out but still effective clichÙs. The Internet combines both the written and the seen. It is both a textual and a visual (and audio) medium. Do people trust Internet content? Is the incredible Internet - credible? |
The Economics of Spam
| by Sam Vaknin | August 13, 2003 | |
Tennessee resident K. C."Khan" Smith owes the internet service provider EarthLink $24 million. According to the CNN, last August he was slapped with a lawsuit accusing him of violating federal and state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and numerous other state laws. |
