The Cole Digest, April 19, 1995

Few buzzwords crackle as loudly in the newspaper industry today as "on-line."

Many metro papers have -- or are planning to -- present themselves on commercial on-line services such as America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe and the soon-to-be-available AT&T Interchange and Microsoft Network.

But some publishers are choosing a different approach, opting, for example, to give their content away free on the Internet.

For the next three weeks, we'll be hearing from Chris Gulker, the former newspaper photographer who started The Electric Examiner, the San Francisco Examiner's World-Wide Web site.

Gulker is now an executive with Apple Computer Inc. (in the publishing and media market group). His thoughts on these issues, though, come from a long career in newspapers.

Here's Chris:

Not long after a few really "out-there" pioneers were uploading newspaper content to CompuServe (over 300-baud modems -- today's models are 64 times faster), researchers at CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) in Switzerland were working on a problem facing high-energy particle physicists.

The physicists' dilemma was this: Only a few facilities on the planet could conduct the experiments they needed to prove or disprove a theory. Travel was expensive, money tight and time on the machines exceptionally difficult to come by.

Ongoing experiments could provide physicists with clues to their own work, if they could only get their hands on the data, which included reams of numbers, reports by the experimenters and photographs (and, later, computer graphics) that showed how particles behaved.

They also knew it would be great if people working in similar theoretical areas could readily share findings and other information.

The answer was the World-Wide Web, a way of configuring a computer to be a server on the Internet. Incoming people (the "clients") would use software that would show text and photos, and which could include links, called hypertext, to researchers' work on any connected computer (the "servers").

With graphical browser software called Mosaic, a scientist in Pasadena could view the latest experimental results in Switzerland, check them against a colleague's paper in Chicago, and offer her thoughts to a team -- whose members worked in Boston, Bonn and Tokyo -- in real time, without budging from her desk.

The WWW sat quietly as a research tool for some years. Then, the base of people, mainly college students who understood how to publish on the new system, began to grow.

As a way of learning the new authoring language, called HTML (or HyperText Markup Language, a sub-species of Sgml, or Standard Generalized Markup Language), student users of high-powered university computers would bring up imaginative "home pages" that addressed everything from their curriculum vitae to musical preferences.

While hardy PC pioneers were typing arcane codes and struggling to slowly download a few grafs of news by modem, students and scientists around the world were looking at pages rich with formatted text and photos. With a mouse click they could jump anywhere in the world, and delve into vast informational treasures.

The cyber cat was out of the bag, as it were.

In short order, the WWW exploded from a few laboratory sites to more than 12,000 servers now estimated to be on the Web. Today the Web is estimated to be available to as many as 7 million people, the majority of whom have access via high-bandwidth corporate or university connections.

Web users are growing faster than the Internet as a whole, and there is a very fast-growing segment of people who are getting to the WWW through Point to Point Protocol (PPP) accounts offered inexpensively by Internet service providers.

Scientists and grad students developed the software to include richer forms of media, including sound and video. Now, well-funded companies like Silicon Valley's Netscape (formerly Mosaic Communications) have begun to develop the software commercially, adding features that will permit such things as business transactions.

Next week: Business transactions.

Onward.

\dmc

[THE COLE DIGEST is written by consultant David M. Cole, editor and publisher of the industry newsletter THE COLE PAPERS. The DIGEST is made available to PressLink members every Wednesday at no extra charge. Send comments by e-mail to cole@plink.geis.com. The COLE DIGEST is the property of The Cole Group, a California sole proprietorship. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of The Cole Group is prohibited. Copyright (C) 1995, The Cole Group. Opinions expressed are those of The Cole Group, unless otherwise noted. [THE COLE PAPERS is a monthly newsletter devoting itself to technology, journalism and publishing. Subscriptions are $117 for 12 issues ($135 outside the U.S.). MasterCard, Visa and American Express cards are accepted. For more information, e-mail cole@plink.geis.com, call (415) 673-2424, fax (415) 673-2449 or write The Cole Group, 2590 Greenwich St., Ste. 9, San Francisco USA 94123-3333.]