I guess I believe at the first millisecond of the race, who is ahead,
and who is behind isn't that important. Someone rushing out to get
the latest betamax player may actually not end up in the best position.
There are a lot of hard issues. For instance, what is the demographics
of the internet audience? Not that knowing who is on today is a fabulous
indicator of the future, but it is a small step.
Jim Pitkow and his associates at Georgia Institute of Technology have
just completed their second survey of the Web. The URL is
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/
The quick summary is that they got 18,000 responses on 4 different surveys.
On the General Usage survey, they got 3522 responses. Mean age is 31,
with 44% between 26 and 30. 90% male. 71% from North America.
27% describe themselves as working in a technical area, 26% were college
students. For more details, please check out the paper.
It is hard to know what to make of all this. 450,000 requests per day
are being made at yahoo, the hierarchical index at Stanford, so 3500
self selected respondees isn't fabulous, but this is exactly the kind
of information one needs to make informed decisions. Interfaces for
academic research are somewhat different from one intended to compete
with rip-my-heart-out-II or whatever is the latest video game.
I think one reason to be cautious is that there are a lot of really hard
issues, especially in the intellectual property area. What worries me most
are institutions selling the electronic rights to their holdings, before we
have any clue as to the real value of the those rights, and the trade-off
of giving exclusive rights in any media for institutions which have serving
the public good as one of their goals.
Being responsible for one WWW server, and helping with a couple more, I
certainly don't want to argue against experimentation, especially as
there are many lessons to be learned.
Anyway, I believe it is early days.
Mark Rosenstein.
=--=--=--=--=--=
Who over Thanksgiving observed his 3 year old nephew siting slack
jawed watching TV cartoons and fevantly wished we could be visiting an
online exhibit on dinasours or snakes or other neat things he is
interested in.
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