<font color=green>1996,1997,1998,1999,2000,2001,2002,2003
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What we are doing here is Internet conferencing.
Someday multinational companies and other groups will catch on to this and start doing it. Someone has to write software for this that is reasonably priced, and also reasonably customizable. It should also include point-to-point encryption of data channels. It's all doable today. It could be a business, the supplying "it" vertically, as many companies could use it.
I have been posting on SI for eight years. 8 thousand some posts. That is about 3 a day. During 4 of those years I ran the Canadian Mining Newsletter. I posted and sent the letter too. As a matter of fact, the newsletter subscribers tbought I posted far too much, and should have given them the info exclusively, as they were paying for it. By 1999 the letter had fallen to only 100 customers due to the mining downturn, so I ended the service. Looking back on that, I am not sure that I should have done it. Some of them at least would have stayed on, and there are similar investment opportunities to the 1990's available now. There probably always will be. The cycle seems to get reborn ever 5 years or so in mining. You need a Bre-X or a Texas Gulf every few years to keep them going. These will surface from time to time for the foreseable future.
There was some talk about shutting SI down a while back. I predict it probably will die as the posters will not pay, and the advertising does not pay. Only so long free can last. The telephone company will not run it. Hell, sympatico has cut my mailbox to 7 megabytes. Never used to have such gateway limitations in the past. The Internet itself is in some trouble. One of the major carriers folded a while back, and Sprint-AOL, who are the major trunk line people are pretty well a chapter 11 case. Yahoo will fold in time. The gateway idea, while appealing, is not going to pay at least the way it is done. Too many channels and not enough buyers. It's the interface stupid. I will not pay for any Yahoo service and I don't see anyone getting much use out of them. You have to sell newspapers to maintain a service and it has to serve some purpose.
One part of the problem that many do not see and is getting a bit obfuscated is the software useability itself. The ability to post and see content in a format. This is highly dependent on WWW standards being developed which if you are software hip means that PDF and MsDoc formats are OBSOLETE, you dolt... !!!! OK, sorry about the insult, but if you don't see the point, it does take some waking up. It as a generic rhetorical insult.
Video, sound, bandwidth, that sort of thing if one person has to send and the other has to receive is a WWW standards thing. Or if could be a software wars thing.
If it is not universally accessible and it does not pay to create it, its channel and its software, then it is not going to survive. But the most people can afford to pay is one carrier rate. This puts all the money to the base connector, which more and more is the phone company. (CRTC take note) Bell with ADSL is killing the ISP's. After that, content providers have to provide something really needed or people won't fork over.
There are a number of factors that most people just don't get. If they did then the web and its useability would be much different.
1. Everybody does not have, nor should they be forced to get, Word Perfect, or Ms Word for Windows.
2. If someone sends a document, it usually requires a reply in the same format, don't you think? Why would you ask a person to have the same software you have to reply? If you would require this, let's say, then why not guarantee you are using the same software to format the data? What do you think about HTML? XML? Do you think this is relevant? What I mean is that proprietary constructions like PDF slow the Internet down, are impossible to edit, so in effect are superfluous and a barrier to communication. If everyone had an integrated editor it would be wonderful. Then we would use PDF instead of WWW HTML. We don't, if we are smart. The so-called security of the PDF document is a con-job. Adobe hype. Non technical companies fall for it as it seem to give them fancy formatting. One of the problems here is no one understands or need to understand XML, and HTMl for document formatting has not kept up. The HTML editors for the most part are abortions. XML translators are in their infancy and are not attached to web browsers.
3. Touch typing and the IBM keyboard are mutually exclusive. MOst people cannot touch type. This means that they are hampered in Internet communication. If more people learned to type then a long post like this one or the reply to it, would be no never mind. This post so far is about 600 words long. That takes me about 10 minutes or less. Most people cannot do this as their typing speed is between 10 to 15 words per minute. They would take near three quarters of an hour to get here!!! I can tell how most people construct their posts, as they make far fewer typos than I do. That means they are proofreading and typing very slowly. I just jam it out there in a mad dash, so it is very economical for me.
<font color=orange>What is needed:
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1. XML software to accept data and format it. Tables, other peoples formats, graphics, and text. Pagination for
printing, postscript, and web publishing. It should work transparently on the site it is put on without loading software. As each key is entered, the remote document is changed. This is called word processing software. (DOH!) It should work across the internet. In some gateways, it would work onto the remote server that interchanges posts automatically like this one, ... SI
2. Touch typing courses for the masses so they can get data in effortlessly. Better Keyboard than the IBM, as in Dvorak, and better physical key architecture and layout. The old Sweda typewriters were best.
3. Charging system of micropayments, so content providers can auction and collect for content and services.
4. Increased bandwidth so that connections are economic and not time consuming to search and page through data. The desirable rate would be ethernet speeds. (10 Megabits per second or 1.25 megabites per second)
5. Better browsers that track data on pages and sites in an accessible reorganizable database that allows on to build better indexing on the fly. It has to semi heirarchichal, date and relationally built. Sites should provide data in XML or HTML that can be click loaded that provide categories to store their data within the user's browser. So each site would have a category button that would provide keys and links to automatically load into such a database. Todays flyouts and lists for site link saving are far too haphazard and hard to use. They just fill up and nothing can be found in them after a while.
The best type of such database report or useable index is a webpage, that is built and rebuilt according to new additions. In effect a "day page" is continuously built, and that is fed on to extract alpha indexing, and heirarchical associations as well. This would be kown as a reportdex.
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