The Cole Papers, Web, August 1995

Connecting: The Lexis/Nexis NewsView Connections system can feed on-line systems and library systems.

While working on the Internet 'why,' suppliers show 'how'

ATLANTA -- Slogans have a bad way of turning on you. They often end up seeming ... well, a bit too ironic for comfort.

Take NEXPO '95 and its slogan, "Focus on the Future." Certainly there was a future focus in this year's product mix. Arguably the only booth that didn't have the words "Internet," "on-line" or "interactive" splashed all over the walls and the literature was the one featuring electric massage chairs designed to ease your aching back.

Everyone had some piece of hardware or software designed to get your newspaper on-line. There were ready-to-run prepackaged Internet servers (see sidebar). There were companies offering prepackaged content for your Web server (see story).

In fact, you could walk around the NEXPO floor one afternoon and leave with a complete on-line newspaper -- hardware, software and content.

So the focus was pretty sharp on how to make the future happen. What remained somewhat fuzzy, however, was what you were supposed to do with your newspaper once you got it on-line, why anyone would want to pay for it, when you would see a profit, where you were supposed to get the money for all this and who -- if anyone -- was actually making any money on-line.

In fact, over at the "New Media: Nut$ and Bolt$" workshop, Publisher David Scott of Access Atlanta (the Prodigy and Internet on-line service by the Atlanta Journal and Constitution) told the audience not to expect profits for the foreseeable future.

Later he defined that as "years."

Back on the show floor, one wag summed up the situation succinctly and, for obvious reasons, anonymously:

"The only people who made money on videotext were the vendors. I'm not missing this one."

Perhaps a less cynical view is that while the business folks are still working out the why, the technical people are starting to make real progress on the how. Here are some highlights:

Two suppliers' products allow newspapers to move their classified advertising on-line.

Edgil Associates of North Chelmsford, Mass., showed a pair of items designed to help newspapers launch a targeted on-line classified product.

The first, AdParse, indexes the text of the ads. That allows you to put up, say, a Classic American Cars category on-line. The database can be set to sweep the AdParse index for Ford, Chevy, Lincoln and so forth in model years 1965 or earlier, and voila! The correct ads are shipped to your BBS or Web site.

The voila in this case is provided by Edgil's new WebCentral product. Rather than converting ads to Web pages via HyperText Markup Language (HTML), WebCentral has a data access client that can be queried by any web browser.

In effect, you crawl over with your copy of Netscape and say, "Hey! Got any listings for pre-'60 T-Birds?" The data access client converts your query to Structured Query Language and hits the database.

The client is also designed to act as a firewall -- in other words, a protective barrier between your database and Internet users.

Synaptic Micro Solutions decided to take the opposite route. HTML has been added as an output choice on its SunType classified system, making output to a Web page as easy as sending an ad to the printer.

Synaptic, of Appleton, Wis., had its own bit of razzle-dazzle to show along with the HTML driver -- the SunType system allows ads to flow back from the Web server. Users perusing your on-line classifieds can enter their own ads using a form, and the system automatically routes them to the classified database.

With the traditional newspaper obsession with typography, it was only a matter of time until someone noticed that printer fonts look like hell when used as screen fonts for an on-line news product.

(Most fonts now on the market are printer fonts, whose characters are optimized for printing. Laser and ink-jet printers have quite different imaging characteristics from computer screens, which tend to have coarser resolution. Consequently, printer fonts can look goofy on-screen, especially when they're run large as headlines.)

Not only did the folks over at Monotype Typographic Inc. notice, they did something about it. Monotype Typographic of Chicago (separate from Monotype Systems since 1992) developed expertise with screen fonts while creating the font set that ships with Microsoft Windows 3.1.

Microsoft had exacting requirements for the fonts, which helped determine the look and feel of the Windows operating system.

Now Monotype is offering 50 fonts designed for on-screen -- and on-line -- use. Besides Microsoft and everyone with a copy of Windows, the fonts are used by Reuters and Nasdaq, and have been licensed to USA Today, according to a Monotype spokesman.

Over at Dewar Information Systems Corp., C.E. Steuart Dewar was showing off his new Internet tools for the DewarView front-end system. The new software from the company based in Westmont, Ill., allows the copy desk to automatically convert stories to HTML simply by routing them to a Web page; the conversion happens on the fly.

Dewar, the company's CEO, said the new software will be a free added feature in future versions of DewarView.

One of the more interesting trends in software is something called middleware, which is software designed to get other programs to work together. DewarView is one example of middleware; Lotus Notes is another.

Middleware may not sound like such a big deal, but just try building your own front-end system with a bunch of copies of Quark XPress and Microsoft Word 6.0. Lots of software products that work well together in their companies' literature don't choose to cooperate in real life.

A great piece of middleware is like the automatic transmission in your car; you know it's behind the engine someplace, you know what it does, but mostly it just works and you don't think about it.

An automatic transmission doesn't power the car; the engine does that. It doesn't move the car; the wheels do that. All an automatic transmission does is get the engine to work with the wheels; a classic middleware role. It may not be as exciting as a high-output small-block V-8 or as much fun as a sun roof, but just try to get to work without it.

That may be a good description of the updated NewsView Connections, a middleware product from the folks at Lexis/Nexis of Dayton, Ohio.

Connections gets text, photos and graphics from your front-end system and moves them to your on-line products, your library and your on-line database vendors.

Connections can accept input from just about anything; the demonstration product was set up for Atex and SII mainframe systems and DewarView.

The product comes with a library of output filters; up to eight can be used at a time. The demonstration system was set up to move content to a library system, a Galacticomm electronic bulletin board system, a World-Wide Web server and a passel of on-line database vendors.

Each output channel can be individually configured. Connections is quite happy to update your BBS and Web server every 10 minutes while dumping stories into your library at 1 a.m. and updating the on-line databases at whatever times you've set up with your vendor.

Once it's all set up, you can forget about it until you have to change something. It's kind of like an automatic transmission for your content.

Speaking of Galacticomm, the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company was on the floor showing off its new World Group BBS. World Group is a client-server system that can do some amazing stuff, such as downloading five files at once in the background while you read your e-mail.

World Group does that by multitasking the modem; while one file is error-checking a packet, the next is transmitting.

World Group uses a fat client; that means as much data as possible is packed onto the client machine where it can be read from a fast hard disk, rather than over a (slower) modem. The software comes with a built-in Web server.

Back on the middleware front, John Juliano Computer Services Co. of Decatur, Ga., was showing its new Atan HTML product, which translates Atex markup into HTML.

The product sits at the end of a serial line and executes the Atex markup, then translates it, according to Juliano. An SII version is in the works, he said.

Right now, the World-Wide Web resembles a traditional one-to-many media product: we talk, you listen.

Compare that to more cyberspace-centric interfaces, such as bulletin boards with their lively discussion groups or MultiUser Dungeons filled with wild interaction and users who recreate -- or destroy -- their environment on the fly.

Digital Equipment Corp. is threatening to change that with its new Web server software. The product, which is still under development, offers interactive polling and discussion forums with messages linked by topic.

The software is under development with Foster's Democrat of Dover, N.H. DEC and the Democrat, a 31,000-circulation six-day evening paper, have launched a series of political forums in anticipation of the '96 New Hampshire presidential primaries.

-- Christopher J. Feola

Dewar Information Systems Corp.,
(708) 850-4350;
Edgil Associates Inc.,
(508) 251-9932;
Galacticomm Inc.,
(305) 583-5990;
John Juliano Computer Services Co.,
(404) 377-9450;
Lexis/Nexis,
(800) 227-9597, Ext. 1819;
Monotype Typographic Inc.,
(312) 855-1440;
PressLink,
(703) 758-1740;
Synaptic Micro Solutions,
(414) 734-6535;
Tribune Media Services,
(312) 222-4444.

While working on the Internet 'why,' suppliers show 'how'

From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.