GNN October Update
From: gnnlist@ora.com (The GNN Subscription Account)
To subscribe, please send mail to info@gnn.com
- New GNN Master Server
- Recent Redesign of Home Page
- Launch of I-media Center
- Important Story -- Copyright Crisis
- Mosaic Handbook Now Available
SPECIAL: GNN is One Year Old
We're almost too busy to celebrate it, but GNN has reached its first birthday. We are still learning to walk! Next week, look in GNN NetNews for DC Denison's article on our first year: GNN Birth Daze. If you have any ideas and suggestions -- critical or complimentary -- about GNN, send them to me (dale@ora.com) and we'll put them online for all to see. It's been an exciting, challenging year, and we are all amazed not just by what we are doing, but by all the activity on the Net.
1. New GNN Master Server
We now have a new, faster master server located at NEARNET in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It replaces a smaller machine that had been overtaxed. Its host name is gnn.com,
although nearnet.gnn.com also works. The URL for the GNN Home Page is:
http://gnn.com/gnn.html
Please continue to use our GNN Mirror sites if they provide better performance
for you. These dozen sites are updated daily and should always be in sync with our
master server. For a list of our mirror sites, look at:
http://gnn.com/wel/sites.html
2. Recent Redesign of Home Page
Like the proverbial box of detergent, GNN's Home Page is new and improved. The most noticeable change is that the Home Page is organized into several sections:
Jennifer Niederst, John Labovitz, Joan Callahan, and Todd Lash worked on the redesign effort, testing the previous design with new users and getting valuable feedback. As a result, there is more descriptive text on the Home Page explaining the different parts of GNN.
3. Launch of I-media Center
We have launched a new center in GNN, called I-media, to look at how the Internet is emerging as a new medium. The I-media Center will cover the design, strategy and new technology of publishing on the Internet. The editor for the I-media Center is Richard Koman, co-author (with me) of the The Mosaic Handbook. Richard is the technology editor for Communication Arts, a national graphic design magazine, and he was formerly the editor of Online Design. The center will also cover important issues affecting consumers and producers of information, as it demonstrates with the articles entitled "Copyright Crisis," described below.
The URL for the I-media Center is:
http://gnn.com/meta/imedia/
If you have ideas for the center or would like to contribute to it, please contact Richard at rkoman@ora.com.
4. Important Story -- Copyright Crisis
The I-media Center presents a very important issue that we feel all Netizens should be concerned about. The Clinton Administration has a proposal to amend the Copyright Act to make the National Information Infrastructure safe for digital publishers. We think the Task Force that prepared the proposal has gone too far in making recommendations that would change the law to the benefit of publishers. It ignores the public interest and would make illegal some practices that are common on the Internet today. This is not to argue for the free flow of all information. However, any change should acknowledge the difference between private and public use of information -- as the current law provides for.
Pam Samuelson of the University of Pittsburgh Law School has provided GNN with a copy of an article that she wrote for an upcoming issue of the Communications of the ACM. Richard Koman has solicited opinions of others on the Net, such as Richard Stallman and John Perry Barlow.
To quote from Samuelson's article: "Not since the King of England in the 16th century gave a group of printers exclusive rights to print books in exchange for the printers' agreement not to print heretical or seditious material has a government copyright policy been so skewed in favor of publisher interests and so detrimental to the public interest."
To follow this story, go to the I-media Center in GNN:
http://gnn.com/meta/imedia/
Remember the Clipper Chip!
5) Mosaic Handbook Now Available
O'Reilly & Associates now has all three editions of The Mosaic Handbook available for ordering directly from O'Reilly or from your favorite bookstore. The Handbook, written by Dale Dougherty and Richard Koman, has editions for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms, with Enhanced NCSA Mosaic on disk. Licensed from Spyglass, Enhanced NCSA Mosaic provides a consistent feature set across all platforms, and proves to be more robust than the public domain versions. The edition for the X Window System contains the public domain version of NCSA Mosaic (version 2.4) on CD-ROM with a special free offer to upgrade X users to Enhanced NCSA Mosaic when it becomes available. These versions of Mosaic have an extra menu for GNN, allowing you to select GNN publications very easily.
For more on this book, you can use the following URLs:
All editions sell for $29.95 and can be ordered directly from O'Reilly by calling 1-800-998-9938 or 707-829-0515. (In the next month or so, we will announce online ordering via Web as well as all O'Reilly titles.)
If you order directly from O'Reilly, and tell them you are a GNN subscriber, we will also send you a Mosaic Handbook tote bag, while supplies last. Please provide the O'Reilly Customer Service person with Code: gnns
Finally, check out the GNN Personal Finance Center with its special feature:
"Network Money: The Future of Banking and Commerce of the Internet." Its URL is:
http://gnn.com/meta/finance/feat/emoney.home.html
Dale Dougherty (dale@ora.com)
Publisher, Global Network Navigator, http://gnn.com/
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
103A Morris Street, Sebastopol, California 95472
(707) 829-0515
The Global Network Navigator
Subscription Account * gnnlist@gnn.com
GNN Registration Page URL * http://www.ora.com/
GNN HomePage URL * http://www.gnn.com/gnn/gnn.html
800-998-9938 (US/Canada) 707-829-0515 (all others) 707-829-0104 (FAX)
The Sun FlashBack - A Full-Text On Demand Newsletter
John J. McLaughlin Publisher & Editor - flash@FlashBack.COM