Vol. 5, No. 12, December 1994

Publishing on the Internet (and World-Wide Web) shouldn't be scary

Mosaic was first demonstrated to me by a college student running it on a laptop -- sitting in his lap -- more than a year ago.

Probably because the machine wasn't connected to the Internet, I wasn't too impressed with what I saw. Also, his personal home page referred extensively to heavy metal rock groups and I'm something of a rock purist.

Nonetheless, I saw a great number of Mosaic home pages (the generic term, which should be more accurately called "World-Wide Web home pages," since there is a large number of Web browsers) over the course of the next few months -- but always printed versions or static screens.

Sometime in the late spring or early summer I was having a phone conversation with San Francisco Examiner Director of Development Chris Gulker (who I first knew when he was a photographer for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) and mentioned the Web.

Oh, yeah, he says, we've put together a home page.

A couple of weeks later one of my clients said, "You know, we both should get SLIP accounts." It took me quite a few more weeks, but eventually I got a Single Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) account from a local Internet provider, downloaded a copy not only of Mosaic (developed by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) but also of Netscape (developed by the same students, now working for a Silicon Valley start up).

The Web is an exciting place to be. I've spent hours and hours probing the network to find not only newspaper pages from the Examiner and Chronicle, but also the Raleigh News & Observer, the Palo Alto Weekly and Wired magazine (not to mention the San Francisco strike newspaper, the Free Press -- about which you'll learn more by reading George Powell’s story inside).

Once I got excited, I thought maybe you should be, too. The first step is easy: Read not only Gulker’s treatise about publishing on the Web, but also Dan Woods' piece on the Wide Area Information Server, a component of the Internet that has been modified for use at the News & Observer.

Woods, the database editor of the paper, worked closely with the paper’s programmers to get Wais working as a newsroom archive.

And for something really far out, try Chris Feola’s thoughts on publishing to personal digital assistants (PDAs) or alphanumeric pagers. Feola, the systems guru at the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American, talked to a range of technologists who say that if you want immediacy, PDA and pager publishing is about as immediate as you can get.

Your next step is to get yourself connected to the Internet. It’s not easy, but your publication will thank you. (To make it easier, get a copy of Adam Engst’s Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh or Internet Starter Kit for Windows; they're published by Hayden Books of Indianapolis. Using the Macintosh book, I got up and running in a couple of days.)

Also inside you'll find news about the more mundane aspects of our business, including the death of the Whirlwind front-end product, the aborted merger between Monotype and Information International Inc., and the sale of the Seybold organization.