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Sam Vaknin's Articles in Internet Show All|Display Category|Title|Newest|Oldest Thoughts on the Internet's Founding Myths Internet users have developed an ethos of anti-elitism. There are no experts, only opinions Invasion of the Amazons The last few months have witnessed a bloodbath in tech stocks coupled with a frantic re-definition of the web and of every player in it (as far as content is concerned). American OverDrive - LCD's in LDC's OverDrive - an e-commerce, software conversion and e-publishing applications leader - has just expanded an e-book technology centre by adding 200 e-book editors. This happened in Montego Bay, Jamaica - one of the less privileged spots on earth. The Internet And The Library "In this digital age, the custodians of published works are at the center of a global copyright controversy that casts them as villains simply for doing their job: letting people borrow books for free." (ZDNet quoted by "Publisher's Lunch on July 13, 2001) The Affair of the Vanishing Content "Digitized information, especially on the Internet, has such rapid turnover these days that total loss is the norm. Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed it may have become too amnesiac already to notice the problem properly." (Stewart Brand, President, The Long Now Foundation ) The Territorial Web The Net was supposed to dissolve anachronistic national borders and cultural boundaries. It was expected to vitiate distance - both physical and mental. It was hailed as the invention that will unify Mankind and harmonize (though not homogenize) civilizations, east and west. The In-credible Web People are conditioned to trust written words, not to mention images. "I read it in the paper" or "As seen on TV" are worn out but still effective clichés. The Internet combines both the written and the seen. It is both a textual and a visual (and audio) medium. Do people trust Internet content? Is the incredible Internet - credible? Medium and the Message A debate is raging in e-publishing circles: should content be encrypted and protected (the Barnes and Noble or Digital goods model) - or should it be distributed freely and thus serve as a form of viral marketing (Seth Godin's "ideavirus")? Publishers fear that freely distributed and cost-free "cracked" e-books will cannibalize print books to oblivion. Miraculous Conversion The recent bloodbath among online content peddlers and digital media proselytisers can be traced to two deadly sins. The first was to assume that traffic equals sales. In other words, that a miraculous conversion will spontaneously occur among the hordes of visitors to a web site. Polyglottal Internet The Internet started off as a purely American phenomenon and seemed to perpetuate the fast-emerging dominance of the English language. A negligible minority of web sites were in other languages. Software applications were chauvinistically ill-prepared (and still are) to deal with anything but English. And the vast majority of net users were residents of the two North-American colossi, chiefly the USA. Seamless Web The hype over ubiquitous (or pervasive) computing (computers everywhere) has masked a potentially more momentous development. It is the convergence of computing devices interfaces with web (or other) content. Years ago - after Bill Gates overcame his misplaced scepticism - Microsoft introduced their "internet-ready" applications. Its word processing software ("Word"), other Office applications, and the Windows operating system handle both "local" documents (resident on the user's computer) and web pages smoothly and seamlessly. Ghost in the Net However far modern science and technology have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible. The Metaphors of the Net A decade after the invention of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee is promoting the "Semantic Web". The Internet hitherto is a repository of digital content. It has a rudimentary inventory system and very crude data location services. As a sad result, most of the content is invisible and inaccessible. Moreover, the Internet manipulates strings of symbols, not logical or semantic propositions. In other words, the Net compares values but does not know the meaning of the values it thus manipulates.	Publish for Free Sign Up For Free Learn More Please Support Our Sponsors Authors and Writers Submit Articles Submission Guidelines Link to Us Member Login U Publish Store Publishers Article RSS Feeds Link to Us Contact Us More Link to Us Privacy Policy Terms of Service Submission Guidelines Popular Articles Article Aids We Recommend SubmitYourArticle iSnare Article Marketer Published.com Article Directories Word Count Utility Search U Publish by: Title Author Keyword

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