SightseeingSightseeingSites of interest, well to me at least.
Several airline companies have a Web presence.
Southwest Airlines at the cleverly named http://www.iflyswa.com has adopted an office metaphor.
American Airlines' site at http://www.amrcorp.com/ includes information about the Sabre reservation system.
Austrian Airlines at http://www.aua.co.at/aua/ provides information in German and English.
Canadian Airline's site at http://www.cdnair.ca/ is also rather lacking in panache.
Air Canada's bilingual site at http://www.aircanada.ca/are includes a downloadable timetable at http://www.aircanada.ca/ac_world/.
Qantas at http://www.anzac.com/qantas/qabtas.htm is fairly basic.
Mexicana is at http://www.mexicana.com/index.html.
No BA, but their favourite airline is at http://www.fly.virgin.com/.
A pretender to the title of top Web searcher is called Alta Vista and comes from Digital. It can be found at http://www.altavista.digital.com/, and is free of charge. It claims to be the biggest and best and promises direct access to every one of ten billion words found in over 22 million Web pages in an index of 33 Gbytes (running on a Digital Server 8400 with 10 CPUs, 6 Gbytes of RAM and 210 Gbytes of disc space). It also offers the possiblity of searching through the unmanageable flood of Usenet postings across 13,000 newsgroups updated in real-time.
The URL for Andersen Consulting is http://www.ac.com/
Apple's URL is http://www.apple.com/. The Power Mac section is at http://www.info.apple.com/ppc/ppchome.html.
If you want to know more or less everything about the Macintosh and the Internet try http://icl.proper.com/1/mac. The opening page lists some 40 Macintosh-related mailings lists. Adam Engst's TidBITS is a free weekly publication available by E-mail (send the message subscribe YourFirstName YourSurname to listserv@ricevm1.rice.edu) and by FTP from ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/issues/. It claims 100,000 readers in 46 countries, a testament both to its consistent quality and to the reach of the Internet. There is a good Web version at http://www.dartmouth.edu/pages/TidBITS/TidBITS.html. This is a particularly good example of how text should be converted to hypertext.
One link from the main Macintosh Index page takes you to information about Usenet newsgroups relating to the Macintosh. Impressive here is the ability to search very rapidly through recent postings (via the URL http://proper.com:70/7wr/vfn/mac-index.inv).
The UK-based Apricot Computers (part of Mitsubishi Electric) has a fairly straightforward Web site at http://www.apricot.co.uk/. There are extensive product details, press releases, downloadable files and even the possiblility of ordering equipment online.
Several banks have set up Web sites. A comprehensive list can be found at http://www.wiso.gwdg.de/ifbg/banking.html.
Barclay's at http://www.barclays.co.uk/ seems to be taking the online medium seriously. For example, it provides PC banking (see http://www.barclays.co.uk/psmd/hob.htm) were you can pay bills, analyse interim statements, set up and/or change standing orders and transfer funds. Barclays is also notable for its Barclay Square online shopping area at http://www.itl.net/barclaysquare.
Few other banks can match these plans. The Liechtensteinische Landesbank has something called Multicash (see http://www.bodan.net/llb/multi.html in German), which is also available from the Dutch ING Bank (see http://www.ing-group.nl/multi/multi1.html). A similar non-Internet services is offered by Bank of America (http://www.bankamerica.com/homebank.html). First Union corporation promises something called cyberbanking (at http://www.firstunion.com/cyberbank/cyberbank.html).
Even more switched-on banks restrict themselves to providing some of their information and analyses online. The French bank Paribas has searchable reports at http://www.paribas.com/versioei/einew.htm; the Deutsche Bank offers the current share prices of 60 German companies at http://www.deutsche-bank.de/online_d/index_e.htm; and the Irish bank AIB has economic analyses at http://www.aib.ie/aib/aibtreas.html. Other banks online have set little more than Webbed corporate brouchers.
(See Currencies)
The last thing you would expect a book publisher to do would be to make its texts available online for free. And yet this is precisely what Que, one of the imprints of Macmillan Computer Publishing, is doing. At http://www.mcp.com/que/bookshelf/ you will find the complete text of nearly 50 Internet and computing books, as well as a search engine for them. Among those on offer are ones dealing with Java, Javascript, CGIm, Active Server Pages, ISAPI, running Web sites using Netscape, Linux, Apache and Windows. Having whetted your appetite with the online version, Macmillan obviously hopes that you will rush out and buy the book.
If you get the urge to buy the printed version probably the best place, for the UK, is the excellent UK online bookshop at http://www.compman.co.uk/.
Other sites to buy books include Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/ and Barnes and Nobles at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/.
Amazon offers at least 30% off hardback boosk and 20% of paperback books and provides a search facility of over a million titiles.
The URL for the BBC is http://bbc.co.uk.
Links to the outside world at http://bbc.org.uk/babbage/
News at http://news.bbc.co.uk/
World Service at http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/index.htm with realvideo at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/on_air/default.htm
TV schedules at http://www.bbcnc.org.uk/bbctv/sched.html.
Dad's Army at http://www.comedyzone.beeb.com/dadsarmy
TV Programme Finder at http://www.rtguide.beeb.com
Student Choice 98 at http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/choice
BT's Web site can be found at http://www.bt.net. Unfortunately all the really interesting stuff is only available internally to BT although information on BT Laboratories at Martlesham Heath, Ipswich are available at http://www.labs.bt.com/.
The venerable Byte magazine, once the definitive technical statement on everything to do with micros losts its way for several years, but more recently seems to have found its way again. As part of that renaissance it has opened a Web site at http://byte.com/ with full text for previous issues of the magazine. One search method has been supplied by the UK company Muscat, http://www.muscat.co.uk/.
for companies doing business or comtemplating doing business in China, the information provided in the China News Digest at the Gopher cnd,org may be useful. There is also a World-Wide Web server at http://www.cnd.org.
The site at gopher://pmphpsvr.pku.edu.cn is located at the University of Peking, and is the first publicly-accessible Internet site in China.
The CIA public Internet site is at http://www.ic.gov/. One of the public services the CIA has performed for some time has been the provision of The World Factbook over the Internet, and is now available as a Web document (http://www.ic.gov/94fact/fb94toc/fb94toc.html). It is a collection of information about the countries of the world - an ideal starting point for those interested in geography, politics and economics - presented in detail and brought up-to-date regularly. The CIA produces a highly entertaining Factbook on Intelligence, though this is probably rather more limited for business users.
More than 800,000 images captured by US spy satellites during the 1960s have been declassified. A catalogue and image browse capability for the entire collection is available for no charge. The URL is http://edcwww.cr.usgs.gov/dclass/dclass.html.
Certain FTP sites have such large and rich holdings that they assume almost mythic proportions. This is certainly true of the great Microsoft Windows archive held at the Center for Innovative Computer Applications (CICA) at Indian University (ftp://ftp.cica.indiana.edu).
Its main Windows holdings are to be found in the directory /pub/pc/win3/. this is then divided into a number of subdirectories. It has a good selection of professional software in demo versions as well as vast numbers of shareware and a few freeware programs.
There is a mirror site at ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing.systems/ibmpc/windows3. The entire library is also available on CD-ROM for $24.9 + $10 shipping. E-mail info@infomagic.com (+1 609 683 5501) for more information.
The US television series c|net Central has a Web presence at http://www.cnet.com/. One of its investigators is Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. Its aim is to be complete online magazinebut is targeted very much at computer, multimedia and online services. It features spoken news in real-time using Real Audio at http://www.cnet.com/Central.Radio/, as well as columns, reviews and downloadable software. The search engine for the latter is at http://www.vsl.cnet.com/ and links to http://www.shareware.com/. There is a separate site for news at http://www.news.com/?ctb.news, for searches at http://www.search.com/?ntb.search and even one devoted to the world of ActiveX at http://www.activex.com/?shareware.navbar and an online shop at http://www.buydirect.com/?download.navbar.The download site is at http://www.download.com/?shareware.navbar.
There is a site entirely devoted to coffee: the URL is http://www.infonet.net/showcase/coffee. And not just as an anitdote for any over indulgence: if you follow the other link Other Ports of Call you an entry header The Trojan Room Coffee Machine (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html).
This is one of the most famous sites on the Internet - and it's British, remarkably enough, When you load the page, you will see that there is a hotspot which leads to a picture of a coffee pot to be found in the computer labs at Cambridge University. And so what? you may say: the 'so what' is that this is a live picture, taken by a camera in situ, and updated every few seconds.
Of course this interesting real-time interactive use of the World-Wide Web is simply a new incarnation of the online coke machines. The command here was generally the rarely-used finger: by 'fingering' the appropriate address (e.g. pspsi@columbia.edu) you obtained information on the current satus fo a cold drinks machine to be found there. Hardly earth-shattering, but a good demonstration of how Internet protocols can be adapted for new and original uses.
If you don't have the finger command (WsFinger can be found at ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/pub/ibmpc/winsock/apps/wsfinger/wsfngr11.zip), you can use E-mail. Send a message with subject line finger pepsi@columbia.edu to infobot@infomania.
Marketing information and technical support is available from http://www.compaq.com/.
Computer Weekly's web site is at http://www.computerweekly.co.uk
Users are required to register (free) for many of the features, including the job site. This means giving your email address and birthplace to confirm. You can set up search criteria for jobs sought which will be posted to you daily and also to enter details about your self and include a CV that is automatically sent to over 500 agencies.
Extensive product details and the latest drivers for Sound Blaster and other products can be found at http://www.creaf.com/.
A page offering up-to-date conversions between 164 currencies is located at the URL http://www.olsen.ch/cgi-bin/exmenu.
The site CyberAtlas at http://www.cyberatlas.com/ lives up to it's name. At http://cyberatlas.com/internet.html there are some handy references to basic information about the Internet, including interesting figures for the size of the Internet population and other demographic information, mostly presented as a comparison of the different market studies available. As well as hard figures about who is spending what online advertising, the Web page at http://www.cyberatlas.com/w3.html has some predictions about the extent to which business will be conducted over the Internet (using digital cash, for example). This section also has a number of interesting links to major companies active in these areas. Another section is devoted to intranets at http://www.cyberatlas.com/intranet.html. Included is a discussion of what intranets are and some predictions from market research companies about the growth of this sector. Network Services at http://www.cyberatlas.com/networks.html explores the larger picture, and places commercial online services such as CompuServe in the context of the Internet.
The tools section at http://www.cyberatlas.com/tools.html is perhaps the richest and most immediately useful. Under the various sub-headings there is information on audio and video tools, authoring tools (for HTML, Java, VRML and database front-ends among others) as well as an examination of the contentious subject of 'clickstream measurement' auditing just how many hits a site receives from visitors.
Two general sections complete the CyberAtlas: Cybernailia (http://www.cyberatlas.com/cybernalia.html) with a fascinating glimpse of the takeover madness the Internet has begotten, and Resources at http://www.cyberatlas.com/resources.html which offer additional lists for further exploration (particularly good in the market research area).
Cybergeography site at http://www.cybergeography.com/atlas/atlas.html aims to provide many different ways of looking at, thinking about and measuring all the things that go on behind cyber-curtains. It does this by conceptual maps, geographic metaphors and the relation between the Internet and the physical world. The trace route pages concentrating on the routes taken by data across the Net has interesting graphical utilities.
You can browse through catalogues of software, read reviews , download demonstration copies and make online purchases. The URL is http://software.net/.
To acces The Daily Telegraph online you need to register at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ and have a browser that supports forms.
The Data Protection Registrar has a presence on the Internet at http://www.open.gov.uk/dpr/dprhome.htm.
dejaNews the leading Web store of Usenet postings has a personalised version of its service at http://wmod.dejanews.com/rg_reg.xp.
Dell continues its tradition of keeping close to its customers at its Web site at http://www.dell.com/. In addition to plenty of files for downloading there is a pilot program whereby you can leave details of your problem for the support team.
a Web-based list of UK companies can be found at the URL http://www.demon.co.uk:80/milfac/. Currently it has approximately 30,000 entries.
Demon is also one of the best FTP sites on the Internet (ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/). The general URL is http://www.demon.net/.
The leading German news weekly Der Spiegel is online at http://www.hamburg.germany.eu.net:80/nda/spiegel/. There are full-text versions in German of its highly useful features, as well as summaries in English.
Dialog Information Services is one of the leading online information providers. The URL is http://www.dialog.com. From here you can obtain information about Dialog's products and services, if you are a customer use telnet to order free fax delivery of some Dialog documents.
A list of online dictionaries, thesauri and related resources can be found at http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/HTML/Dictionaries.html.
Digital's huge Web site at http://www.digital.com/ includes a vast amount of technical information about Digital's products, easily accessed using either a very swish graphical front end or the brower and search engines. There are innumerable links out into the Internet for a wide range of topics organised by reading rooms - the one headed Museums and Libraries at http://www.digital.com/info/edu/lib_rr.htm is particularly rich.
Digital own use of the Internet are of note; it has more than 40,000 TCP/IP nodes and sends more than 2 million E-mail messages a month. Details at http://www.digital.com/info/internet/.
The Digitrends site at http://www.simweb.com/digitrends/index.htm offers an interesting variety of information on the subject of Internet marketing and advertising. As well as features - including a good introduction to this whole area at http://www.simweb.com/digitrends/content/features/puzzle/puzzle.htm there are news stories and particularly valuable resources page at http://www.simweb.com/digitrends/content/resources/resmain.htm. Here are links to the general site at http://itools.com/researchit/researchit.html, search engines at http://www.beaucoup .com/engines.html, huge collections of links at http://www.hotsheet.com/ and http://www.hotwired.com/wiredsource/ and business resources. Among these are the Internet Advertising Resource Guide (at http://www.admedia.org/internet/ and the Web Marketing info Centre at http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/ are worth a look.
Adaptec is at URL http://www.adaptec.com/. Other manufacturers with online help and guidanance about disk drives can be found for Conner at http://www.conner.com/p-disk.html, for Maxtor at http://www.maxtor.com.products.html; for Quantum http://www.quantum.com/support/jumpers/; Seagate at http://www.seagate.com/techsuppt/drivespecs/specfinder.html; and Western Digital's address is http://www.wdc.com/support/FQA/general.html#jumper.
The Web pages at http://www.disktrend.com/ carry high-lights from the Disktrend reports on the disc drive industry. Also available are links to data storage manufacturers, industry suppliers, trade associations and university research departments.
Dun & Bradstreet has a server with a series of tutorials designed to help small businesses. The address is http://www.dbisna.com.
Earn, the European Academic Research Network at http://www.earn.net/ has a number of extremely useful documents. Grouped together as the Guide to Network Resource Tools, these pages provide a complete introduction to all of the main internet tools.
These documents can be obtained from http://www.earn.net/gnrt/notice.html; using the Gopher at gopher://gopher.earn.net:70/11/doc; FTP at ftp://ftp.earn.net/pub/doc/resource-tool-guide.ps (as a postscript file) and resource-tool-guide.txt (as ASCII). To get the information via e-mail send the message get nettools.txt to the addresss listserv@earncc.earn.net.
The main Earn page has a link to terena at the URL http://www.terena.org/. Standing for Trans-European Reasearch and Education Networking Association, Terena was formed at the end of 1994 out of a fusion of Earn and Rare.
Earn also provides a gatway to the BITnet network. The BITnet crops up in a number of listserv mailing lists. Most Internet systems can cope with addresses like listserv@ukcc.bitnet, but some can't.
Earn provides a way of contacting them; just send your message via the gateway using an address with the form listserv%ukcc.bitnet@earn-replay.ac.uk instead.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) at http://www.eff.org/ acts as a watchdog of the Internet Community. Founded by a group of online computer luminaries such as Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow (you can find the original announcements at http://www2.eff.org/pub/EFF/Historical/eff_founded.announce, and some of their writings at http://www2.eff.org/pub/Publications/), this organisation is dedicated to to examining the social and legal issues that arise from the new world of the Internet and related services. The issue over cryptography and the ability to use it without governement meddling is discussed in http://www2.eff.org/pub/Privacy/. The UK Government wants to be able to obtain the encryption keys of all norminally secure transmissions. Details on this illconsidered move at at http://www2.eff.org/pub/Global/Britain/Privacy/Key_escrow/. Documents concerning intellectual properies are to be found at http://www2.eff.org/pub/Intellectual_property/ and the archive index is at http://www2.eff.org/archives.html.
Free registration to Electronics Weekly at http://www.electronicsweekly.co.uk/.
One company working to turn the dream of creating functional devices that can be controlled over the Internet and hence creating the intelligent house or office is Emware at http://www.emware.com/.It has produced a range of tools for creating these Internet-enabled embedded devices. As the executive summary ar http://www.emware.com.p_exec.htm and technical details at http://www.emware.com/p_tech.htm expalin, these are based on a 'skinny' server called emmicro which needs just 30 bytes of RAM and 750 bytes of ROM. It works with small packets of information, microtags, which control the embedded device. The server communicates with a conventional Web browser which provides the user interface. These will be graphical representations of conventional devices such as switches and knobs. Typically they will be written in Java, and allow users to control their equipment over the Internet without the need to learn a new interface.
The site at http://www.enews.com/ offers rich contents. Business titles at http://www.enews.com/monster/business/ is broken down into various categories: general business, consumers, enterpreneurial and small business, finance, investment, management, marketing, etc. The list of internet and computer related titles is at http://www.enews.com/monster/internet includes CyberCulture at http://www.enews.com/monster/internet/body.html#CyberCulture and Internet section at http://www.enews.com/monster/internet/body.html#Internet/Web. Also useful for searches across all the articles held on the site is the search engine at http://www.enews.com/monster/.
The car rental firm in the UK, Eurodollar has set up a World-Wide Web server at http://www.eurodollar.co.uk. It offers car hire details and application forms for its customer privilege card. Use E-mail to reserve a car.
The European Union and its various holdings has a URL of http://www.echo.lu/. You can also telnet to echo.lu and log in as echo.
For information on the euro go to http://europe.eu.int/euro with English language at http://europe.eu.int/euro/default.asp?lang=en. For good explanations of what the euro and economic and monetary union (Emu) realy means to buinsess try the British Treasury's page at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/pub/html/docs/emu/main.html.
Excite at http://www.excite.com/ offers a search engine, a directory and columns,news (at http://www.excite.com/Bulletin/) and a cartoon (http://www.excite.com/Toon/Toon.html).
Fastcompany at http://www/fastcompany.com/home.html is a business title with rich content. The magazine section covers @Work looks at tools and ideas shaping the new workplace; Benchmarks offers photo essays, the Consultant Debunking does just that. RFTF is a report from the future, while Big Idea has a mish-mash of these. The Toolbox section offers more practical resources.
For analogue and digital video capture and non-linear editing. http://www.fastmultimedia.com and UK site at http://www.fusewire.com .
Dealers: Germany
http://www.digitronic.ch/video/fast2.html (DV Master SFr.3339 & SFr.4779)
http://www.computerbecker.com/ (DV Master Dm 3695 & Dm4990)
MCA/Universal Cyberwalk site can be found at http://www.mca.com/. This has links to many parts of MCA's business: there are also sections devoted to television and records. Pages are very colourful and images large. Downloading video clips of several megabytes can take a long time. To find out what the system requirements are look at http://www.mca.com/mcahelp.html.
Buema Vista, a subsidiary of Disney has sites at http://bvp.wdp.com/index.html and http://bvp.wdp.com/BVI/index.html. If you only have a slow connection you are offered the Press Room where words and stills are used. FAQ are available at http://bvp.wdp.com/BVP/Players.html with information on the set-up you will need, solutions to typical problems, and hotpots to take you directly to the necessary software.
The fairly dry US-centric WWW site http://www.financenet.gov/ has some interesting links that will carry you to a number of important sites throughout the world holding financial and business information. Following 'Links to other sites' and 'Finance -related sites' there is a long list of accountacy sites, including an important one in the UK at http://www.ex.ac.uk/~BJSpaul/ICAEW/summa/ICAEWTEST.html. From here you can jump to such delights as the Cost Accounting Home Page, as well as more general business information servers.
Among these is http://www.ai.mit.edu/stocks.html. This is a service provided free by MIT which displays various graphical representations of important stocks in the USA. both price and volume over the last year or so up to the present are given. From miscellaneous list there is a site called FINweb (http://riskweb.bus.utexas.edu/finweb.html). Plenty of interesting areas to try out here, including one that contains some of the most thoughtful writing available about the business and economic implications of the Internet. The URL is http://www.homefair.com/homefair/busecon.html. This too has further links out into financial cyberspace that are well worth exploring.
The Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce is a free bimonthly online publication.
The site at Global Mega - People Finder allows you to carry out searches at online white pages directories from a single page. As well as the main US directories there are also European entries.
O'Reilly & Associates, better knwon for its series of technical books on UNIX and network issues publishes free information with many jumping-off points for further exploration. Registisation is required. UK users can access this through the mirror site at http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/gnn/.
At the heart of GNN is the catalogue of Internet Sites found in Ed Krol's classic The Whole Internet book, converted into a searchable hypertext page with hotspots. Of particular interest is the list of top 50 sites. A separate Business Pages contains various commercial services, while NetNews details some of the latest Internet developments. Other sections include a Help desk for Internet beginners, and online 'exhibitions' that look at particular topics.
If Mosaic was the catalyst for the Internet business revolution the honour for triggering the uptake of computers in companies probably goes to Visicalc, the first spreadsheet written for the Apple II.
Its inventor, Dan Bricklin is clearly someone that just can't stop the ideas flowing. After Visicalc he launched Dan Bricklin's Demo Program, which lets companies prototype their products, and has now come up with a unusal program called Tellix (homepage at http://www.trellix.com/ ). This is software that lets you create and view hyperlinked documents without needing a server.
whether or not the world needs a pseudo-web one useful spin-off of Bricklin's experiences in creating hypertext business documents is a free Web site which is called Good Documents, with refreshingly literal URL http://www.gooddocuments.com/homepage/homepage.thm.
As the page Where to apply these ideas emphasises ( http://www.gooddocuments.com/homepage/whereapply.htm ), the site "is not a guide for making cool web sites that attract readers. It is a guide for populating an intranet with documents that help a business be more effective", and as such is unlike most other Web design sites, since intranets are very differnt in this respect.
there are some quite interesting preliminary discussions of the theory of intranet design ( at http://www.gooddocuments.com/philosophy/philosophyhome.htm ), on why skimming is important ( at http://www.gooddocuments.com/philosophy/skimming.htm) for example, and the differences between writing word processor documents and Web pages (at http://www.gooddocuments.com//philosophy/wpvsweb.htm).
More practical however, is the Techniques section (which is at http://www.gooddocuments.com/Techniques/techniqueshome.htm). Here is plenty of sensible advise about the best way to use links, typefaces, image maps, and lists, along with other more general design issues..
A good test of Web design sites is how they treat the controversial issues of frames, and the When (and how) to use frames page (at http://www.gooddocuments.com/Techniques/whenframes.htm) offers good if mildly pro-frame advise on the subject.
Meanwhile, the samples section ( http://www.gooddocuments.com/samples/sampleshome.htm ) is rather short at the moment, while Related Sites ( http://www.gooddocuments.com/related/relatedhome.htm)is much fuller and has plenty of further material which has been designed to stimulate thought.
Hansard which gives a daily word-by-word account of Parlimentary proceedings publishes the previous day's proceedings on http://www.parliament.uk.
The famous Cambridge bookshop Heffers now has an E-mail address. Orders will be accepted from account customers and those who can give a valid credit card number at orders@heffers.co.uk. General enquires should be directed to heffers@heffers.co.uk.
Hewlett-Packard is located at http://www.hp.com/home.html. Some good graphics and plenty of information on HP9000 and HP3000 ranges and workstations.
Hewlett-Packard E-site is http://www.hp.com/Ebusiness/main1.html which is a magazine with regular sections on news, short features, new technologies and product reviews.
HotSheet at http://www.hotsheet.com/ uses tables in a minimalist fashion to convey as many links as possible in a compact yet legible format.
InfoLink Information Centre is a WWW server for Hong Kong businesses which is also designed to provide information to the international community. It can be accessed at http://www.infolink.net. Another business directory for Hong Kong is at http://fareast.com/hongkong/directory.html.
The Hong Kong Internet Directory at http://www.internet-directory.com/ claims to offer an updated list of all Hong Kong commercial Web sites as well as details about hotels and other local infromation.
IBM has good links to a wide range of information and a useful search engine that lets you find information on a particular topic wherever it is hidden locally. http://www.ibm.com/.
The PC division can be found at http://www.pc.ibm.com/. As well as press releases and product details there are files for downloading and links out to the wider Internet.
IBM also has a whole site devoted to E-business at http://www.ibm.com/e-business/.These pages are well worth exploring, more for its design than for its good but inexceptional content. IBM have managed to represent information using very simple graphical means.
URL for ICL is http://www.icl.co.uk
The Sunsite at Imperial College's Department of Computering, Londonhas been mentioned several times in Netspeak. It huge holdings exceed 61Gbytes of files served by an eight-processor system.
The Web pages at http://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ has a friendly looking front end, but is not convenient for browsing. Going straight to ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/, in contrast, provides you with some huge directory trees to wander among.
Although there are many ways of entering interesting directories perhaps the easiest is to take the option O-Most-Packages, near the top of the directory listing. Within this directory there are sub-directories to all the main holdings at this site. Unix users are well served with directories devoted to BSD, X-window and various distributions of Linux.
The Linux directory includes mirrors of all the main Linux sites and the two main newsgroups, comp.os.linux and comp.os.linux.announce (at ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/O-Most-Packages/Linux/).
Users of Windows can find gigabytes of files under ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/O-Most-Packages/ in the subdirectories simtel-win3, windows3, simtel-win95, win95, simtelnt and windowsnt.
DOS files are under simtel-msdos and MAC files under infomac.
The mirror of the Gutenberg project is at ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/O-Most-Packages/Project-Gutenberg/ and Internet drafts (ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/O-Most-Packages/internet-drafts).
Info Manage at http://www.infomanage.com/ is a rather dull starting point to some interesting information. Links to marked Investment at http://www.infomanage.com/investment/default.html takes you to a page which starts with a rather cude use of tables and then flowers into an extraordinary list of various kinds of business sites. For example http://www.infomanage.com/investment/default.html#100 there is a list of just about every Stock Exchange on the Web. There are also collections of links to information on bonds (http://www.infomanage.com/investment/default.html#4), foreign exchange rates and dealing (http://www.infomanage.com/investment/default.html#2), real-time or near real-time share prices (at http://www.infomanage.com/investment/default.html#6), and share analysis.
The international resources (at http://www.infomanage.com/international/default.html) have links to pages about nearly every country in the world - an invaluable reference for any one conducting business overseas. Useful in this context are the international trade resources at http://www.infomanage.com/international/trade/default.html.
There is also a long listing devoted to miscellaneous Internet and computing subjects (at http://www.infomanage.com/internet/default.html). Included is a good section on NT, with a variety of pages from technical and user groups.
A list of news sources (http://www.infomanage.com/news/default.html) provides some useful starting points for exploring the rich online world of news.
A commerical search engine is available from InfoSeek (http://www.infoseek.com/). You search through 50 computer magazines, four weeks woth of archives taken from more than 10,000 Usenet groups, 200,000 WWW pages (full text), newswires and press releases, company profiles and much more. The basic payment plan is $9.95 a month, and lets you carry out 100 transactions. WWW retrievals are free. After 100 you are charged 10cents for each additional transaction and a one month's trial is available free.
Inside Information is the UK directory of software and hardware for PCs and networks: It is published on disk, updated monthly, and, for each product, lists references to all the reviews in the major computer press back over three years.
o Search by manufacturer, product or category
o Access any phone or fax number with just two mouse strokes
o Browse through "A-Z" lists of manufacturers and
products
o Browse through the two-level hierarchy of product categories
o Copy details for one or all selected products to the clipboard
o Collect "tagged" products of interest in your
personal notebook
o View Buyer's Guide tables displaying prices, number of reviews
etc.
The full version of Inside Information includes all 20000 references and details on 7500 products from 2000 suppliers. The database is updated monthly. A demo version can be downloaded from http://www.inside-information.com.To order the full up-to-date version, just call Michael Harper at Codehigh:
E-Mail: sales@inside-information.com
Phone: 0118 972 4905
Fax: 0118 972 3353
Intel's Web site is at http://www.intel.com/.
A group of more than 100 Universities has created the Internet2 project with home pages at http://www.internet2.edu/ essentially to create a parallel but connected network that can be used by researchers for advanced projects.
http://www.internic.net is the URL (universal resource locator) for the nearest thing that the internet has to an official single repository of information, a body of three separate commercial organisations with different Internet addresses but a common means of access. InterNIC is the nearest thing to being the guardian of the Internet.
The fornightly Webzine Intranet Design at http://www.innergy.com/ is one of the best intranet resources on the Web, and is particularly notable for the quality of its writing.
Sections include the Digest at http://www.innergy.com/in-news.html,Javascript tutorial at http://www.innergy.com/clientcorner.html and active discussion area at http://www.innergy.com/ix/index.html, a well designed page of intranet shows and events with full links to assiciated Web pages at http://www.innergy.com/ievents.html and an excellent and wide ranging intranet FAQ at http://www.innergy.com/ifaq.html . Back issues are also available at http://www.innergy.com/idm/index.html.
The International Standard Organisation (ISO) URL is http://www.iso.ch/welcome.html.
One of the richest sites, at least in terms of information about the online academic community is Janet at http://www.ja.net/.
Logica has a World-Wide Web site at the URL http://www.logica.com.
The London International Futures Exchange has a Web page at http://www.liffle.com/.
Lotus Web site at http://www.lotus.com/ has used InterNotes Web Publisher to create Web pages from Lotus Notes files.
Lycos (http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/mlm/lycos-all.html or http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/) is a Web spider, crawler, robot or worm. That is it is an automated technique for discovering and recording URLs in an attempt to map out Webspace. Lycos knows over 1.5 million URLs. This requires a fast and efficient search engine.
Lycos at http://www.lycos.com/, originally developed at Carnegie-Mellon University, and generally accepted as the best of the automated online search tools, with a catalogue of over 5.6 million Internet addresses. Along with significant words, the Lycos database stores the first 20 lines of each document. Although taking a very different approach from Yahoo for its development, Lycos illustrates an important trend for the Internet that is likely to become more common in the future.
As part of its commercialisation, Lycos Inc is licensing the Lycos database and search engine to third parties. One of these licensees, NlightN, which has incorporated the Lycos catalogue into what it claims is the world's largest table of contents (at http://www.nlightn.com/). Another company that uses the Lycos database is rather better-known: Microsoft has added it as part of the Microsoft Network. Lycos is open to licensing its products either for internal use - for example, in a large organisation as a network resource tool for its employees - or for inclusion with other products (contact mikeo@lycos.com for more information).
The most recent re-packaging of the Lycos database is in some ways the most interesting. Frontier Technologies (home page at http://www.frontiertech.com/), whose SuperTCP Pro was discussed in these pages back in May, has taken the information and released it as a CD-ROM called SuperHighway Access CyberSearch.
Not all of the Lycos base has been included: contained in the 608 Mbytes on the disc is information on around 500,000 pages. The search engine is also simplified: whereas Lycos possesses a reasonably powerful search language (see http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/lycos-search-help.html for details), the CyberSearch tool allows you to enter just a word or phrase.
In use the search engine run on a reasonably fast PC proves slightly slower than using the maximum speed available from the main Lycos database itself. The latter search turned up about three times more results than the CD-ROM version on average, both for common and obscure search terms.
If CyberSearch suffers in terms of speed and database size, its big advantage is of course the ability to carry out searches offline before connecting to the Internet to view the results. As a result of its popularity, Lycos can be difficult to access at peak times (see the graph at http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/hourly.html for an indication of when not to use Lycos). CyberSearch saves you from having to make constant attempts to access the database and wasting time waiting online; it also enables you to recompose searches at your leisure until you get the results you want, or simply to browse through Lycos' holdings for interesting Internet sites. Moreover, the product is cheap: as little as $6.75 for a monthly subscription, so this will soon be recouped even if you search the Lycos database just once or twice a day (see http://www.frontiertech.com/subscrib.htm for more information about purchasing the disc).
But more important than the product itself is the approach. As the Internet has matured, some of its vast holdings have grown into valuable stores of information (like Lycos). Many Internet sites represent unique collections of pointers to information on a particular subject that is scattered far and wide over the Internet, and which would be hard to create starting from scratch. In other words, their value lies in the structure that they offer. It may well make sense to re-package this distillation as a CD-ROM or in other forms, adding to and complementing the basic information. Expect to see more such spinoffs in the coming months as the Internet starts to spread its wings into other media.
A Yahoo-like directory of Internet Sites organised by subject is available from http://a2z.lycos.com/. Also included are regualr columns that have little to do with Web searches, but add to the general interest.
This company has been producing some of the best anti-virus programs for many years, and it has always been happy to distribute its products on a shareware basis. For anyone who downloads files from the Internet a virus scan and repair program are essential: cases of infection from the Internet are rare, but, as ever, prevention is better than cure. McAfee has an anonymous FTP site where you can download all of its latest products. The URL is ftp://ftp.mcafee.com/pub/antivirus. First look at the file 00_INDEX.
A number of Que books have been made available to download. At http://www.mcp.com/que/bookshelf/ you will find the complete text of nearly 50 Internet books as well as a search engine for them. Among these are:-
Java (http://www.mcp.com/que/et/se_java2e/),
Javascript (http://www.mcp.com/que/et/se_javascript/),
CGI (http://www.mcp.com/que/et/se_cgi),
Active Server Pages (http://www.mcp.com/que/asp/book/),
ISAPI (http://www.mcp.com/que/developer_expert/isapi/),
running Web sites using Netscape (http://www.mcp.com/que/et/rapnets/),
Linux (http://www.mcp.com/que/et/intlinux/),
Apache (http://www.mcp.com/que/et/webapache/)
and Windows (http://www.mcp.com/que/et/rapwsww/).
The site allows you to purchase books, but for the UK use http://www.compman.co.uk/AD.CGI/634.
Marketing Mix is designed to be a central source of information about marketing. It can be found at http://www.nsns.com/Mix.
Microsoft can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/ and at http://www.msm.com/.
The latest Internet Explorer can be found at http://www.msn.com/ie/ie.htm.
UK information starts at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/.
Business information starts at http://www.microsoft.com/smallbiz/.
The best link is For Developers only at http://ww.microsoft.com/devonly/. From here you can get to the Internet Control Pack and find out about Microsoft's ActiveX approach or view the Internet Development Toolbox.
Microsoft has made available a free software development kit (SDK) for use with its new Visual InterDev Web application development system. The Design-Time ActiveX Control SDK aids the creation of server-side components for use in Active Server Pages.
The systems professional page is at http://www.microsoft.com/syspro/tocNew.htm Background information on products at http://www.microsoft.com/syspro/tocEvaluate.htm and free tools written in Visual Basic for Applications at http://www.microsoft.com/vba/powertools/vbapowertools.htm.
How Microsoft manages www.microsoft.com can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/syspro/technet/tnnews/features/mscom.htm.
The European mirror site is at http://www.eu.microsoft.com/.
Not content with increasing stranglehold on the basic infrastructure of business Bill Gates is also aiming to dominate a few other markets through vastly ambitious personal prjects. Teledesic at http://www.teledesic.com/ explains the ideal of offering wireless Internet connectivity at fibreoptic speeds to every part of the world using no less than 288 low-Earth orbit satellites. Corbis at http://www.corbis.com/ is the world's largest digital archive of images. Corbis possesses more than 20 million imagesm including digital rights to the pictures in London's National Gallery. These pale to insignificance compared to some of Gate's investments in biotechnology.
Microsoft's Terraserver project at http://terraserver.micosoft.com/ is attempting to make a terabyte of satellite images of the Earth available. the opening page shows a map (US centric) and allows you to zoom in for search for a particular spot. You can buy digital images using a secure connection.
Service provider Mistral Internet has launched UKSearch, a search engine with a database of more than 250,000 Web sites. It claims to have all the power and features of large US global search engines, yet contains only UK companies and sites, which eliminates thousands of irrelevant worldwide results returned by standard search engines. It is avaliable at http://uksearch.com.
Information on the PowerPC and other products can be found at http://www.mot.com/PowerPC/.
The Movie Database at http//uk.imdb.com/ has more than a million film entries (see the statistics at http://uk.imdb.com/database_statistics.html). It is one of the most popular and best-known UK sites, even if its British origins are obscured by its global reach and organisation.
The full details of the Internet Movie Database's history can be found at http://uk.imdb.com/FAQ.html#history. Essentially a few unrelated lists about films were brought together, unified and made available by e-mail through the PC User Group (at http://www.pcug.co.uk) and a Web site at Cardiff University. In March 1996 it became a for-profit organisation (details at http://uk.imdb.com/imdb_ltd). Access remains free, with costs paid for by sponsorship and advertising.
The site's approach to advertising includes a couple of interesting tricks. The first allows referring Web sites to retain an on-page backlink for visitors who pass on to the Internet Movie Database, enabling them to return easily (see http://uk.imdb.com/marketing.html). Normally these kinds of pass-on visitors are lost to the original site unless they choose a browser's back arrow. Another enhancment is to allow advertisers ti supply a number of different banner ads and to monitor which is being clicked upon, and adjust their placement dynamically (see http://uk.imdb.com/News/release0606.html for details).
An online museum of marketing and advertising icons (physical onces) has been created at http://www.toymuseum.com/. The site is copiously illustrated with images - often rather large.
The National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) developed the browser for the World-Wide Web called Mosaic. The NCSA's own web pages are a reference point for new WWW servers see the every changing What's New page at: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/whatsnew.html.
Netcraft site at http://www.netcraft.co.uk/ is recognised as offering a key Internet information service: mapping out which software Web servers are running.
Its Web server survey (available free at http://www.netcraft.co.uk/survey/)represents perhaps the most complete, and certainly most objective, snapshot of the server side of the World Wide Web today. It has visited more that a million sites and presents the results in a garph as well as tables. From this you can see if Apache is still the most popular Web server and see what grounds Microsoft free Internet Information Server is making and the rise of NT over UNIX systems. You can check out what software a site is running from http://www.netcraft.co.uk/cgi-bin/Survey/whats.
The home pages of Netscape Communications (at http://home.netscape.com/) must be one of the most famous sites on the Internet, at least for fairly seasoned users. Besides downloading yet another beta version of Netscape Navigator there is are many riches to be found there. If you are using Netscape Navigator as your Web browser, it already comes with some handy buttons that take you straight to highlights. The What's New button delivers http://home.netscape.com/home/whats-new.html and its manageable list of new sites; What's Cool takes you to http://home.netscape.com/home/whats-cool.html and fair list of some of the most interesting sites on the Internet.
The Directory menu includes an Internet Directory organised by subject (at http://home.netscape.com/home/internet-directory.html); Internet White Pages (at http://home.netscape.com/home/internet-white-pages.html) for trying to find people online (with variable success, unfortunately); and a section explaining the Internet itself (at http://home.netscape.com/home/about-the-internet.html).
Netscape site is minimalist. The opening page fits comfortably on a single PC screen. The layout is simple letting visitors get to where they want to go with the minimum of fuss. There are four main sections, Netscape software, content, community and commerce. Content to bring in visitors, community to keepthem and commerce to make the money.
The grandly called Planet Science is the cyperspace home of the New Scientist magazine. Its URL http://www.newscientist.com/, interestingly as the title forms part of the Anglo-Dutch Reed-Elsevier group. Like many such free sites you need to register to use it. The main opening page at http://www.newscientist.com/ps/home.html employs an attractively light background and short but clear links to the principal sections. These include This Week (science and technolgy news and reports) at http://www.newscientist.com/ps/thisweek/index.html, and the Networld section at http://www.newscientist.com/ps/networld/index.html. Here you will find Planet Science's top 10 scientific sites online, as well as reports on new computer and Net technologies. The neat small icons used for navigation, found at the foot of each page, contrast to the overblown graphics that all too often bloat files.
The NewsWire server (http://info.learned.co.uk) from the UK company Learned Information provides subscription details and lets you read features from the current and previous issues of NewsWire. This often carries interesting and unusual stories from a nicely Eurocentric viewpoint. There is a Gopher at info.learned.co.uk.
NeXT Inc World Wide Web Site is at http://next.com/. Besides details on products and services the site holds updates for many devices (including video graphics cards, SCSI controllers, sound cards and backup devices), articles and example code for Openstep on MACH (NeXTSTEP) and Windows NT/95.
WebObjects, software designed to make the creation of Web-based applications faster by using object-oriented approach was announced in September 1995. More information about the product can be found at http://www.next.com/WebObjects/. Don't miss the Web demo at http://webdemo.next.com/ this is designed to show off it's WebObjects software. Here a virtual car showroom lets you choose cars according to various criteria.
webPages is a WYSIWYG HTML editor which runs on the NeXTStep/OpenStep platform. It is available for Intel and Motorrola chips, and supports the platform-independent OpenStep, allowing it to run under solaris, OSF/1, Windows NT and Windows 95. for more details see the URL http://www.pages.com/.
A service called NlightN (sic!) promises an index of over 100Gb in size, including the British Library and Library of Congress. Full text search of 14 newswire services and uses Lycos database for information about the Internet. The URL is http://www.nlightn.com/.
Nokia has a Web server at the address http://www.nokia.com/ with information about the company, its products and current research.
Nynex's 280 editions of Yellow Pages for the north-eastern US can be accessed free online. You can look up names, addresses and telphone numbers at the URL http://www.vtcom.fr/nynex.
The Official and definitive Web Site for Peter Rabbit and the World of Beatrix Potter can be found at http://ww.peterrabbit.co.uk. The design is by Corsellis-Montford, one of Europe's leading online marketing and design strategists, the site is a mine of information for the Beatrix Potter enthusiast.
PharmWeb is a pharmacy information resource with links to other pharmacy servers in the world. Its URL is http://www.mcc.ac.uk/pharmweb/.
Point Communications Corporation at http://www/pointcom.com/ has adopted a grading approach to lists of Internet sites. It claims to offer descriptions and rating of the top 5% of all World-Wide Web sites (ranked in the categories of content, presentation, and "experience"). The site is free and paid for by the advertising that it carries. It offers three alternative ways of viewing it: text only, regular graphics (using .gif files) and deluxe graphics (using .jpg files). You are offered a choice for further exploration: today's new Web sites reviews, all reviews and top 10 lists. There is also a link to a witty FAQ that is wll worth reading. Each review includes scores for the three attributes and a link to a 100-word review.
News sites are at http://www.pointcom.com/gifs/new/ and consolidated listings at http://www.pointcom.com/gifs/survey/ and top sites at http://www.pointcom.com/gifs/topsites/.
CIWEM http://www.interfac.com/ciwem
Inst. Chem. Eng. http://icheme.chemeng.ed.ac.uk
Inst. Civ. Eng. http://ice.org.uk
Inst. Elec. Eng. http://www.iee.org.uk
Inst. Mech. Eng. http://www.imeche.org.uk
The site at http://www.projectcool.com/ is useful for Web developers, especially as a source for information, The main Developer Zon at http://www.projectcool.com/developer/ has a few basic pages but is aimed more at the experience user. There is a table of HTML tags and of Java Script objects and one on cascading stylesheets. Java Script and tips about Web design are also covered.
Red Herring home page at http://www.redherring.com stands out among business-oriented titles. Start at http://www.redherring.com/mag/home.html which provides links to features in the current issues, the latest news and perhaps the most useful back issues. Practically all of its back issues are online.
Salvo converts between 3270 datastreams and HTML so you can view and interact with mainframe data using just a Web browser. A demo version can be downloaded from http://www.simware.com/salvo/.
A Web site devoted to search engines is at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ which can also be browsed using the site map http://www.searchenginewatch.com/sitemap.htm. From here you can access the guide to search engines at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/wgtse.htm.There are details on how search pages are ranked at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/rank.htm and details on the search engines at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/features.htm and tips on how to help your Web pages appear higher in the search results of those using the engines at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/tips.htm.
If you need up-todate information about Singapore, including stock exchange and financial information try the URL http://www.ntu.ac.sg/intv/intv_www.html. This has a live feed of a local public information teletext service, and requires a special viewer, available for Microsoft Windows from the same site.
SingNet claims to be the only commerical service provider in Singapore. It has a URL at http://www.signnet.com.sg/ with telcoms information.
UK shops with Internet presences includes Sainsbury's at http://www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/. There is some rather dull information about its stores, press releases, a promotional video and at http://www.jsainsbury.co.uk/wine-director/shop/ you can order wine; but you still have to pay by phone.
The Body Shop has a difference approach. Most links lead to information about worthy subjects such as endangered species, violence against women and missing persons. Boby Features includes The Ultimate Guide to Shaving. 'Hang Ten' regards the Government's environmental record.
Virgin Records at http://www.vmg.co.uk/ has minimalist texts and garish graphics. To get the most out of the sound and video samples look at the toll chest: http://www.vmg.co.uk/toolchest.html. There are also links to German and French versions of the page.
Yahoo's shopping mall at http://shopguide.yahoo.com/ uses categories, information about Visa (the main sponsor to this section). computer section at http://shopguide.yahoo.com/shopguide/comp.html has merchant spotlight (ESP at http://www.computeresp.com/) as well as a link to Computer ESP's site, there is also the possibility of searching directly through its catague from the Yahoo page.
Excite's shopping channel at http://www.excite.com/channel/shopping/ links lead not to further Excite pages, but off-site completely (e.g. books to Amazon.com) with no way to reach alternative suppliers.
SLED Corporation has put together a list of Internet users and their E-mail addresses. It is free but you are asked to add your own details to as to broaden the scope of directory for the common good.
There are other paid-fo services you can use, such as employing the search agent which can watch out for particular names among newcomers. Details can be found at the URL http://www.Four11.com.
Sun (http://www.sun.com/) has long been active in the area of the Internet, and this is reflected in its excellent site. This is a great example of how to put together a good commercial Web site.
An index of online telephone directories around the world is available at http://www.contractjobs.com/tel/.
Time Out Net at http://www/timeout.co.uk/ covers Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York, Paris, Prague, Rome and San Francisco. You need to register, but the service is free. The design is relatively restrained but effective.
Time Warner has put together one of the best Web sites on the Net. The URL is http://www.timeinc.com/.
The full graphical version offers what is effectively a contents page to the online magazines and books, with a very simple but effective design that highlights the lead stories. There are links to the hot news stories of the day, the latest issue of Time, current issues of two of its gardening magazines, and a link to the Complete Gardener encyclopeadia. Notable is the use of hypertext hotspots within articles to fill out aspects of the story.
The site also has a very comprehensive search mechanism, allowing you to look through some or all of the magazines online, a very neat graphical representation of the various pages on offer (http://www.timeinc.com/time/universe.html), and even chat areas for leaving comments on the articles and responding to other messages.
All this is free, although this slick and professional site may convert this to a paid-for-service.
The times Higher Education Supplement has a URL of http://www.timeshigher.newsint.co.uk/.
A personnel site packed with the kind of information that can make the difference between working and wasted PCs can be found at http://www.tomshardware. Here are reviews of 20 slot 1 motherboards with Intel 440BX chip-set, 3D chips and background pages on motherboards, chip sets, RAM, hard discs, video cards, BIOSes and over-clocking, Further links at http://www.tomshardware.com/links.html shows that Tom ( a German living in the UK) is not alone with his obsession with hardware.
Worth a look are the Drivers HQ site ( http://www.drivershq.com/ ), a page about storage ( http://thefnym.sci.kin.nl/~pieterh/storage.html ) and Spumador's home page ( http://www.venus.it/homes/spumador/ukindex.html) which has large and impressive resources. these include a list of 1200 computer hardware manufactures on the Web ( http://www.venus.it/homes/spumador/driver.htm)and links to enough information about hardware ( http://www.venus.it/homes/spumador/infhw.htm)to keep even the company guru happy,
There are some interesting experiments in open government such as the excellent listing at http://www.brent.gov.uk/other/uk-locl.htm#LGSITES.
As well as a comprehensive catalogue of local councils online, there are also links to relevant mailing lists (at http://www.open.gov.uk/cogs/coglist.htm), a listserver devoted entirely to IT in local government (at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/stathkelvin/locgovit.htm), a E-mail directory (at http://ww.netlink.co.uk/users/moray/mlgcont.html) and a reference to the UK Usenet newsgroup news:uk.gov.local. You can also search this site (at Brent) via the URL http://www.brent.gov.uk/search.html#Brent.
One example of how to provide a Web server of real service to customers (council tax-payers in this case) can be found at the London Borough of Wandsworth at http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/. This concentrates on one aspect of local government, that of planning applications. By using the helper program obtained from http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/download.html you can view scanned copies of current planning applications online at http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/topframes.html.
You might like to compare the UK's attempt at http://www.open.gov.uk. The name promises more than is delievered by the CCTA, but it's a start!
The Treasury Internet Service offers news releases, minister's speeches, minutes fo the Chancellor of the Exchequer's monthly meeting with the Governor of the Bank of England, and reports of the panel of independent forecasters and information about the budget. In addition to FTP (ftp://ftp.hm-treasury.gov.uk) and World-Wide Web (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk) servers, there are also a couple of mailing lists open to all, and joined by sending either subscribe press or subscribe whatsnew respectively to maillist@hm-treasury.gov.uk. There is also an FTPmail server (send the message help to ftpmail@hm-treasury.gov.uk for more details on how to use it) which is restricted to this site only.
The main URL is at http://www.open.gov.uk/index/oindex.htm, which acts as the umbrella site for a variety of government bodies. There are links to sites of speciall interest for business. The Central Statistical Office is at http://www.emap.co.uk/cso/ (with the CSO's databank of over 55,000 time-series at http://www.emap.com/cso/databank/), and the Labour Market Statistics Group (at http://www.open.gov.uk/Imsg/Imsghome.htm). The CCTA's site is at http://www.open.gov.uk/ccta/cctahome.htm, and includes interesting tender information and a report on its ATM testbed (at http://www.open.gov.uk/ccta/testbed.htm).
The Central Office of Information which advises on and buys publicity services in all media for its clients in departments and agencies is at http://www.coi.gov.uk/coi/.
Major institutes include Customs and Excise (http://www.open.gov.uk/customs/c&ehome.htm); the Data Protection Registrar (http://www.open.gov.uk/dpr/dprhome.htm); the Department of Trade and Industry (http://www.dti.gov.uk/), including the Information Society Initiative for business (at http://www.isi.gov.uk/introisi/introisi/hmtl); the DVLA (http://www.open.gov.uk/dvla/dvla.htm); the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (http://www.open.gov.uk/maff/maffhome.htm); Health and Safety Executive (http://www.open.gov.uk/hse/hsehome.htm); the Inland Revenue (http://www.open.gov.uk/inrev/irhome.htm); and Oftel (http://www.open.gov.uk/oftel/oftelwww/oftelhm.htm, with a search engine).
The URL http://www.undcp.or.at/unlinks.html has a very comprehensive list of links to Gophers and Web servers run by various United Nation bodies and other international organisations.
The modem manufacturer has a Web site at http://www.usr.com/.
USX is a Web server that acts as a global classified ad service for used software is at http://www.hyperion.com/usx. There is no charge for this service.
The Web pages at the Internet supplier UUnet are at http://www.uu.net/. UUnet is partly owned by Microsoft and in turn owns one of the UK's main Internet suppliers, Pipex. A map at http://www.uu.net/bbone.html gives a graphical representation of the various elements of UUnet's US connections along with their relative size. An Internet primer at http://www.uu.net/primer.htm is aimed at business users. A glossary of terms is at http://www.uu.net/glossary.htm and a short list of basic Internet resources at http://www.uu.net/dir.htm.
More than 1300 hardware and software vendors are accessible from the URL http://www.ronin.com/SBA/. The organisation is alphabetical, and there is also a search engine.
Information on present and future Visa products as well as downloadable financial programs and tips about money are available at http://www.visa.com/visa.
A site devoted to the world of Visual Basic (versions 3 and 4) can be found at http://www.iadfw.net/gbeene/visual.html. It has links to third-party products, books, magazines, FAQs, files and software archives.
Walnut Creek CDROM at http://www.cdrom.com/ claim to have the world's biggest and most active Internet site. Although Walnut Creek sells CD-ROMs (its catalogue is at http://www.cdrom.com/cdrom.html) it also makes most of its products available online: a total of 72Gbytes.
A good source for Linux (at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/linux/) and FreeBSD (http://www.cdrom.com/pub/FreeBSD) other holdings include the Cica archive - Winsite, with URL http://www.winsite.com/ at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/cica.
Anglian Water http://www.anglianwater.co.uk
Bristol Water http://www.bristolwater.co.uk
Severn Trent Water http://www.severn-trent.com
Southern Water http://www.scottishpower.plc.uk/frameset_ourbusiness.htm
South-West Water http://www.swwater.co.uk
Water Services Association http://www.water-services.co.uk
Environment Agency http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk
Ofwat http://www.open.gov.uk/ofwat
Drinking Water Inspectorate http://www.open.gov.uk/doe/envir/water/h2oinfo.htm
The Web review at http://www.webreview.com/ is noteworthy for the quality of its information and writing. The design is a clever use of Javascript to produce a framed banner ad that changes as you move the mouse around its border.
The heart of Web Review are its features at http://www.webreview.com/universal/features.html.Along side these are the workshop for designers ad http://www.webreview.com/dstudio/ and an even better back-end developer at http://www.webreview.com/workshop/.
One of We Review's sister sites is that associated with the World-Wide Web Journal at http://www.w3j.com/.The publisher O'Reilly has placed the full text - with images - of all back issues online at http://www.w3j.com/archives.html.
The White House has a very impressive set of WWW pages at http://www.whitehouse.gov. There are clickable maps and plenty of background information on the government machine of the USA.
The magazine Wired has an interesting online existence. It WWW server can be found at http://www.hotwired, and has a number of useful holdings.
The online version of the hip hard-copy parent is called HotWired and sports rather over the top graphics and original design, including asbsence of written explanations.
Wired has consistently identified new trends early, and has also used some of the best US technology writers, so its in-depth articles make a good starting-point for those who wish to do background research.
To use HotWired you must register (which is free), although some pages are accessible without; choose a password, and be sent a verification number. You will also need quite a fast Inernet connection as the graphics are sometimes unwieldy and, in the absence of text, indispensable.
One of the most useful sections is Signal, "The Pulse of the Digital Revolution". This often contains writing of much insight and even when wide of the mark is uually highly entertaining, for example in Net Surf, which changes every day.
One of the most important organisations in terms of shaping the future of the World Wide Web is the World Wide Web Consortium usually abbreviated to W3C. This is headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who invented the World-Wide Web at the European nuclear research establishement CERN in Geneva. It has two seats, one at MIT in the US, and one at the French Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique at http:///www.inria.fr/.
The former has one of the richest of all sites for Web-related material, at the URL http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/. As well as details about W3C (including a members list that is a veritable rollcall of the computer industry at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Consortium/Members/List.html), this is one of the best places to start when browsing the Web or seeking reference information on the subject.
For example, there is information about the back-ground to the whole area (http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/WWW/), help on setting up a Web site (http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Provider/), and useful information on conferences (http://www.w3.org/pub/Conferences/Overview-WWW.html), mailing lists (http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Mail) and newsgroups (http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Newsgroups.html).
From the opering page there are also links to very full documents on central concepts such as HTTP, HTML, URLs and CGI. Two pages of particular interests to businesses are those on the development of Internet payment systems (at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Payments/) and security (at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Security/).
W3C has its own technical reports: areas covered include a proposal for micropayments (widely believed to be one of the key elements for Internet commerce) and PEP, a protocol for allowing extensions of HTTP.
Two of the greatest resources available from this site are the World-Wide Web Virtual Library and the list of servers. The former (at http://www.w3.org/pub/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html) provides a massive subject catalogue of Web servers, while the server listing (at http://www.w3.org/pub/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html) is nothing less than a breakdown by country of all registered Web servers.
Older material has been placed in an archive section http://www.w3.org/WWW/ with the princple holdings of the site at http://www.w3.org/Areas. Under user interface (http://www.w3.org/Areas#UI) is the work on HTML, graphics, internationalisation, fonts, sytlesheets, printing and Amaya (an advanced browser used as a testbed for new Web features). Technology and society (http://www.w3.org/Areas#TandS) looks at privacy issues, property rights, digital signatures, electronic payments, PICS, security and online collaboration.
The European arm is at Inria (http://www.inria.fr/ ).
Xerox has two sites worth exploring, one at http://www.xerox.com/ which has background documents on things like Documents on Demand, and another at http://pubweb.parc.xerox.com/ which is the Web server of the PArc research establishment.
Yahoo at http://akebono.standford.edu/yahoo and http://www.yahoo.com/ provides access to more than 23,000 entries under broad headings such as Arts, Business, Computers, etc. The Business section is further broken up into subsections such as Corporations and Marketing. Under Corporations you will find more than 5,000 companies on the Internet all with hotlinks.
The search facilities provide are an excellent way of finding information about companies, products and general subjects. You can search by title, URL or comments. You can also specify whether the search should be case sensitive or not, and exact or a substring.
For some time it has been the undisputed leader when it comes to offering a comprehensive listing of Web sites. This predominance was confirmed when it obtained sizable funding from a venture capital company with the aim of turning it into a commercial service - still free, but expanded and paid-for by advertising. The first fruits of that major shift are evident in the revamped Yahoo, accessible at its old address.
The change is evident from the opening screen: gone is the simple (and dull) listing of site categories: now there is a clever use of tables to produce a two-column effect, and a bright new logo that manages to capture the spirit of the site (as reflected in its name) without using excessively ornate images that take minutes to download (something that many other sites could learn from).
This shrewd use of simple but effective graphics is just the first sign that some serious professional expertise has been brought to bear upon what was a rich site to start with, but one that betrayed its academic origins (it began as a project of two postgraduate students). In fact at the URL http://www.yahoo.com/docs/pr/credits.html there is an interesting list of the main companies who have been involved in the transformation, including those offering marketing communications, public relations, Web monitoring and news feeds. The latter - supplied by Reuters - represent perhaps the most profound change at the site.
The news appears in two contexts, as a category in itself (Headlines) and as tags (called Xtra!) that appear against some of the subject headings. This news element is important beyond its actual content (which is currently heavily-biased towards the US market - a rather blinkered move given the global nature of the Internet and Yahoo's user base) because it indicates the site is beginning to broaden out from its initial focused role of a Web server directory to become a more general service.
In effect, Yahoo is attempting to create a virtuous circle whereby adding more material increases its popularity so that through advertising - another important feature of the new Yahoo - it can afford to add yet more services. The end-result will be a site that becomes a one-stop shop on the Internet, an indispensable bookmark for every Web browser - and an online advertising spot able to command premium rates (as HotWired at http://www.hotwired.com/ has become following a similar strategy).
In this, Yahoo is likely to be setting an important trend that will become evident over the next year when other very popular sites manage to follow suit and become one of the dozen or so key commercial Internet sites offering everything users might want: search engines, listings, news, chat areas etc.
A corollary is that anyone not in this first division of generalists will be forced to specialise in a particular niche. Within each of the latter, the same concentration of power will take place as a few leading sites emerge that offer everything a user with particular interests might want within that more circumscribed domain.
The reason for this shift is the fundamental problem faced by everybody on the Internet: it is too big and has too few signposts. Anything that simplifies the task of finding information by offering a single, reliable point of reference is bound to be popular, and this applies to both generalist and specialist resources.
It is perhaps already possible on the basis of current developments at leading sites to pick out some of the likely winners in this Darwinian struggle. Alongside Yahoo and HotWired (which has grown enormously since its inception), Time-Warner's Pathfinder site (at http://www.timeinc.com/) is also constantly adding features to broaden its appeal. Another member of this limited club will surely be the huge search site called Lycos.
Yahoo, as many other sites, allows you to set up a customised version of various feeds and its contents (at http://my.yahoo.com/).
Regional variations for the UK and Eire can be found at http://www.yahoo.co.uk/, for France at http://www.yahoo.fr, Germany at http://www.yahoo.de , Canada at http://www.yahoo.ca and Japan at http://www.yahoo.jp and a helpful page on how to display Japanese characters in your browser at http://www.yahoo.com/docs/info/bridge.html.
Also worth a look is the VRML Yahoo at http://3d.yahoo.com/3d/yahoo3d.html which lets you navigate through a space of categories. This much-touted approach sounds great in theory, but it is slow and of little use, at least for the moment.
News items have been offered for some time (http://www.yahoo.com/News/) but also offers Yahoo Internet Life a magazine jointly produced with Ziff-Davis (see http://www.yahoo.com/adv/ziff/fform.html), and Yahoo Unplugged (http://www.idgbooks.com/idgbooksonline/yahoounplugged/yahooun.html), a book of the Web site.
The year 2000 poses interesting problems for computer users. The common practise of coding only the last two digits means that when 2000 arrives the 00 may convert to 1900 or some other default number.
Microsoft products are affected by the coding of dates in a bewildering variety of ways. A useful document explaining what the respective limits of its main software programs are at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/desk/office/2000.htm.
Many Web sites have sprung up offering links to information and companies that can help. One such person is Peter de Jager at http://www.year2000.com. Included here is much useful information on the problem.
A slightly less self promoting site is at http://www.it2000.com/. Some interesting material can be found at http://www.itpolicy.gsa.gov/mks/yr2000/y201toc1.htm.
Ziff-Davis at http://www.zdnet.com/ provides links to Inter@ctive Week (http://www.zdnet.com/~pcweek/navigator/navigate.html). A useful general facility is the ability to search the whole site (http://www.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/taos_mf.pl?unix).
There is also a free personalised newswire at http://www.zdnet.com/~zdi/pview/pview.cgi. You have to register for this and can then enter areas of interest so when you enter this page you get the latest news stories that match. The pages contain discreet advertisements that fund the page.
Specialised Electronic Mailing Lists Specialised electronic mailing lists keep you informed on a day-to-day basis or provide you with a one off set of information. Some require a subject line such as subscribe or send and typically the body of the message is blank. To get off the mailing list you typically send an E-mail with the subject line unsubscribe or signoff. It is important to distinguish between the mailing list address where you send relevant comments and the administrator's address where you send messages asking to be taken off the list. It is bad manners to misdirect such requests to the thousands of users on the mailing list.
There are thousands of such lists. Complete lists can be obtained by E-mail, send to listserv@ndsuvm1.bitnet with the message list global. This is huge. Use the mailserver's intelligence to carry out searches for particular topics. Send an E-mail to istserv@ndsuvm1.bitnet with the message list global/computer (~ 100 entries with computer in their description) or list global/business (~ 36 entries). A more convient form of this is available from the URL http://www.clark,net/pub/listserv/listserv.html where you can choose between a topical categories of alphabetical organisation.
bbslist@aug3.augsburg.edu (both subject line and body of message are blank - enter blank spaces if your e-mail system objects to this) provides three text files (two documents and an acknowledgement - about 90Kb). The most important is called Special Internet Connections, which lists many sites on the Internet.
enew@microsoft.nwnet.com with subscribe WinNews Your E-mail address in the body of the message is a free electronic newsletter about all flavours of windows.
savetz@rahul.net with subject line send ipress lists several online journals called The Internet Press.
gophermail@enews.com with help in the body of the message accesses the Electronic Newstand, an online listing of the contents and back-issues of many leading magazine titles.
RSI-UK is a UK-based list for discussion of RSI, tendonitis, tenosynovitis and other forms of upper limb disorder. To subscribe send E-mail to listserver@tictac.demon.co.uk leaving the subject line blank and with the message subscribe rsi-uk yourfirstname yoursurname.
PIM-L is an open unmoderated discussion list about personal information managers and related topics. Subscribe by sending the message subscribe pim-I YourFirstName YourSurName to listserv@usa.net
MAPI-L is a forum for software developers involved in programming for the Microsoft Mail API. To join, send the message sub mapi-l YourFirstName YourSurName to listserv@listserv.net.
To join a general mailing list discussing HTML Plus, the next generation of the HyperText Mark-up Language, send the message subscribe html-wg YourFirstName YourSurName to html-wg-request@ocic.org.
Database is a discussion mailing list for database programmers, designers and administrators. To join it send the message subscribe database YourEmailAddress to majordome@seas.smu.edu.
Excel-G is an open, unmoderated mailing list about the windows version of Microsoft's spreadsheet Excel. To join send the message sub excel-g YourFirstName YourSurName to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com.
Hytelnet offers a handy way to "telnet" to nearly a thousand interesting sites. Hytelnet explains how to access British Telecom's Electronic Yellow Pages. Amazingly this service is free: to access, telnet to monolith.cc.ic.ac.uk and login as eyp.
Hytelnet is shareware available by ftp from ftp.usask.ca in the directory /pub/hytelnet.
Why not use the largest library in the world - the US Library of Congress which has many books written in English, music and records? It's catalogue and other services are available free by telnet to locis.loc.gov or point your gopher at marvel.loc.gov.
Cambridge University Press Information Services are available by telnet to ftp.cup.cam.ac.uk. Login as cc with password cup.
Looking for information about India, especially telecoms? Try the gopher at mahavir.doe.ernet.in.
Last updated 21st February 1999
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