CMC Magazine October 1, 1995 / Page 15
From: Markus Schlegel
To: john@december.com
Subject: letter to the editor
In his article about the "Untimely Death of Yahoo," (CMC Magazine,
September 95), Louis B. Rosenfeld takes an apporach which,
considering Yahoo alone, certainly corresponds to my experiences
in searching the Net.
However, the situation doesn't seem hopeless; solutions could
exist. In a distributed environment for the retrieval and
dissemination of information, much of the responsibility rests
with those actually offering information. A few guidelines
that could be helpful for the info-provider:
- Do not enter vanity-pages into any search engine
- If you are planning a page, check to see if other pages
do the same job
- Describe what your page adds to knowledge not
otherwise available on the Net
- Link to other homepages and people, describing what you
think their pages add in new knowledge; describe who these
people are, and how they relate to you professionally.
(Remember that possibly enough "cool links-pages" already
exist).
All this bases on the understanding of two concepts, which
might eventually turn out to be quite relevant: on one hand,
you will have to be ready to share your really relevant
information (the "who-information", as opposed to the
"what-information") with an unknown reader. That is mainly a
question of courage, examples, however, exist.
On the other, some research points into the direction
that the passing on of information in the form of
hypertext will be much more what it has been--oral tradition,
"frozen" into links to other sources of
original information.
In all, distribution is all about moving away responsibilities
from clearinghouses, while significantly increasing the
responsibilities of every single Net-citizen.
CMC Magazine welcomes letters on subjects
relating to
this magazine's contents or computer-mediated communication
in general. Send email to
john@december.com.