Online articles from March 1998

Online archives from March 1998

The empty glass and too much water. (Editorial)
March 1, 1998... A long-standing joke tells the story of a man who habitually took two drinking glasses to bed as part of his nighttime ritual--one filled with water and the other empty. The reason, he said, was that he would either wake up in the middle of...

Filtered news services: solutions in search of your problem.
March 1, 1998... Information products, like cars or food or polymers, come in varying degrees of quality, just as they have varying prices, availability, and features. Products do not exist in a vacuum; their quality can only be stated in relation to a...

Live long and prosper: aligning IRC strategies with the business.
March 1, 1998... "IRCs that put info icons on intranets are confirming a management mindset--The IRC doesn't add value, it just provides resources. This is a big mistake." Optimal information resource center (IRC) alignment may be defined as the best...

The Desktop Data/Individual, Inc. merger.(Interview)
March 1, 1998... On November 3, 1997, two firms in the electronic news delivery business--Desktop Data and Individual, Inc.--announced a definitive agreement to merge and form a new company--NewsEDGE Corporation. ONLINE Publisher Jeffery Pemberton (JP) and Editor...

Lori Fena.(Interviews with Infopros)(Interview)
March 1, 1998... What could possibly get an average of 250,000 to 300,000 people a day flocking to a home page on the World Wide Web? Sex? Violence? Free tickets to the Super Bowl? Guess again. One of the most popular sites on the Internet is concerned with...

Custom pages on-the-fly: a new model of interactivity emerges on the Web.(includes related articles)
March 1, 1998... Going beyond showy and gratuitous interactivity for its own sake, a number of innovative Web designers these days are offering their visitors custom World Wide Web pages on-the-fly. They have discovered that by harnessing the Web's inherent...

Little things mean a lot: worthwhile PC gadgets.
March 1, 1998... Would you spend $15 to make personal computing significantly more pleasant and probably more efficient? You would? Then I have a deal for you. It works equally well with Windows 95, Windows 3.x, Mac OS, OS/2, NeXTStep, BeOS--or Linux, for that...

Regular oil changes for your PC?
March 1, 1998... Well, no, but... I've noticed lately that no one talks about computer maintenance anymore. One reason, I'm sure, is that we've been conditioned for years now to consider PCs as disposable products. Newer, faster machines appear so quickly...

"Researching people" on the Net.
March 1, 1998... The Internet has changed the way we think about information and searching. Although many bemoan the commercialization of the Net, it is important to remember that there is still a lot of good, factual information available there--and much of it...

The numbers game: the top 10 sources for statistics.
March 1, 1998... Just ten sources will answer a large proportion of statistical questions. Most are available free or at low cost on the Web. Ugh, there's that word: statistics. Makes you shudder, doesn't it? The very thought causes eyes to glaze over,...

Tips and tools for beginning Web authors.
March 1, 1998... Editor's Note: Joyce Adams facilitated a popular Roundtable on Maintaining Web Sites at ONLINE WORLD '97. We asked her to collect and organize some of the ideas, that circulated in the room. Here are just a few of the results of that session and...

Toward more comprehensive Web searching: single searching versus megasearching.
March 1, 1998... In my October DATABASE column, I explored the size and overlap of the major Web indexes and discovered that these search engines have much less overlap than might be expected. Instead, each database has unique records. Given the number of...

CompuServe to AOL: requiem, reprieve, or revival?
March 1, 1998... At first it seemed that this might be a requiem for CompuServe. Upon hearing that the venerable consumer online pioneer was sold to America Online, I (and others) feared that it would be absorbed completely or altered beyond recognition. But...

Images are your business: business and economic graphics on the Web.(includes related article)
March 1, 1998... If you're an information professional and you think images aren't your business, think again. Not only can images instruct, enlighten, and uncover, they can enhance your business. A graph showing interest rates, prices, or demographics over...

The Copyright Clearance Center and publishers. (Royalty Fees, part 1)(Conflicted Copyrights)
March 1, 1998... Information professionals are often asked to explain copyright and royalty payments to their clients and patrons. Users seldom understand that obtaining a reproduction of a journal article is not as simple as making a photocopy, downloading...

Setting your sights on TARGET (it pays to look twice).
March 1, 1998... As a diehard DIALOG user--with the system since 1985--have celebrated each new feature in its turn. In 1989, just after I had manually removed duplicates from over 1,000 medical citations, I cheered the institution of the REMOVE DUPLICATES...

Collectanea DeskTop Library: the future of corporate end-user searching?
March 1, 1998... With fixed-fee pricing, end-user searching, full-text articles, a Web interface, and enterprise-wide desk-top/intranet delivery, Collectanea is a prime example of the evolving new model for providing information. Traditional information...