Internet Tools for Business.
Steve.Cavrak@Uvm.Edu
http://www.uvm.edu/~sjc/
Introduction
The "Information Superhighway" evokes an image of millions of users
zipping by at the speed of light. A more useful image might be that of
an "Electric Avenue" teeming with millions of shoppers strolling
through the global village market - a market filled with vendors,
kibitzers, performers, and, yes, lurkers. Forget shopping malls,
welcome to the virtual bazaar.
These notes, and those of other presentations, are available from the
World Wide Web, via http://www.uvm.edu/~sjc/powerbook.html and
may be used from the Internet lab at the conference. You may also
obtain a copy via e-mail
from Steve.Cavrak@Uvm.Edu. If you decide to read this document, be
aware that anything you read here will self destruct in 5 minutes. We
will disclaim all knowledge of this document.
The basic tools
- Address: The Internet address is an "easy to remember"
way of identifying computers, institutions, and "domains." Reading the
address "moose.uvm.edu" left-to-right, spelling out letters which do
not form recognizable words, (moose dot uvm dot edu), specifies the
"moose" computer at "uvm" which is in the educational domain. In the
US, the main or top domains are ".com", ".edu", ".gov", ".mil",
".net", with ".us" now becoming popular for "local" entities.
Outside the US, the top domains are the two letter ISO codes: ".at"
for Austria, ".de" for "Deutschland," etc. In the UK, the address is
often written backwards, just the way they drive.
- E-mail address is an internet address with a userid
attached to the front with an "@" (at) sign. My e-mail address reads
"steve dot cavrak at uvm dot edu".
- URL: The Universal Resource Locator provides a more
or less uniform reference mechanism for internet resources. It
identifies the type of service offered, the address of the hosting
computer, and perhaps a (UNIX style) specification of the file name.
Under my e-mail address is the URL for my "home page" - which reads
"http colon slash slash www dot uvm dot edu slash tilde sjc slash"
- [w] World Wide Web: WWW is the "hot" internet providing
simultaneous delivery of text, image, motion, audio, and video -
multimedia - to a desktop. The interface is based on active links
embedded in the normal flow of text and images. hypertext. At
the server end, there is a series of "HyperText Markup Language"
(HTML) files - text files with "marked" tags. A URL that looks like
"http://www.uvm.edu/" points to a HTML resource. The key word "http"
identifies a hypertext document.
- [w] Mosaic: NCSA (National Center for Supercomputer
Applications) Mosaic was the first WWW user tool to make it big time -
mainly because it was available for Macintosh and Windows workstations
first. Several other "mosaic like" tools are available, including
EiNET"s MacWeb and WinWeb (which can run "stand along", perfect for
notebook computers without a connection to the network), and The
Mosaic Corporation's NetScape (written by the original NCSA Mosaic
team who were recruited to California by an aggressive developer.)
The word "mosaic" is now as used both specifically and
generically.
- [g] Gopher: is an menu oriented internet document delivery
system. At the server end of the network is a directory (folder) of
files. The URL for a gopher looks like "gopher://gopher.uvm.edu/."
- [e] E-mail: The sine qua non service. This is the
low cost, low overhead, high impact, high contact tool. This allows
your customers to get in touch with you and viceversa.
- [v] CU-SeeMe: An experimental video conferencing system for
the internet. This is still in "beta test."
- [w] Apple Computer's
web is home to the latest Apple technical information, software
updates and a variety of information resources about Apple related
products and services. This site is updated on a daily basis.
- [w] You Will! be a winner !
(Maybe.) AT&T opens it's contest home page!.
- [w] British Broadcasting
Company hosts a web page for its Networking Club. The club aims to
help people in the UK get to grips with computer networking, and the
Internet in general. Their second aim is to enable the BBC to explore
ways of using the Internet as a broadcast medium in its own right.
- [w] Bell Atlantic uses its home
page for a variety of purposes -- telecommunication news, legislative
update, as well as some product information.
- [w] Burlington Coat Factory
One size fits all !
- [w] Cybermalls, Colchester,
VT shows that you don't have to be a megalon to grab a nice piece
of cyberspace real estate (Virtual Estate?)
- [w] Champlain Valley
Union, a high school on the internet.
- [w] Welcome to CD-Now is "The
Internet Music Store" stocks over 140,000 CDs, cassettes and
mini-discs, with over 100,000 different titles, CDnow! is the largest
music store in the world.
- [w] Deluxe Business Systems
offers over 2,000 items for our office needs.
- [w] The Directory of Advertising
and Direct Marketing Agencies is maintained by Michael
Strangelove, who also publishes the Internet Business Journal. For
more information you may
e-mail mstrangelove@fonerola.net.
- [w] The Electronic Freedom
Foundation is a non-profit civil liberties public interest
organization working to protect freedom of expression, privacy, and
access to online resources and information. Press a button and change
the world.
- [w] The Internet Florist Shop
Send flowers by e-mail.
- [w] Hawaii, FYI the State
of Hawaii's statewide public information system designed to support
the Hawaii INC initiative to make Hawaii the information bridge
between east and west. On the net, there is no east or west.
- [w] The Information Arcade
houses a collection of eclectic knowledge. It also houses some
commercial firms.
- [w] IBM currently uses the
Internet to provide general information, and is planning to use it to
support specific customers with a service giving IBM engineers the
ability to diagnose computers remotely. Don't call us, we'll call
you.
- [w] The Internet Credit
Reporting Agency lets you check for the validity of social
security numbers ($7.50 each), run credit reports, etc. Hmmm.
- [w] The Internet Shopping Network,
is hiring webmasters and html writers at their Menlo Park,
California location. Internet Shopping Network was recently purchased
by the Home Shopping Network ( a $1.2 billion cable TV retailer
located in St. Petersburg, FL). ISN operates the largest mall on the
Internet with 20,000 products from 2,000 different vendors and is
currently expanding its staff.
- [w] Kspace.Com is the home of
the Kaleidoscope Art Gallery, a gallery that offers independent
artists an opportunity to meet clients.
- [e][g] Senator Leahy's e-mail address is
"Senator_Leahy@Leahy.Senate.Gov" He also has a gopher directory in the
Senate Gopher. However, "Senate
policy restricts a Senator's use of the Senate Internet servers during
the sixty days before an election."
- [w] McDonalds is an example
of someone asleep at the wheel. If McDonald's has a CIO, he should be
fired, then rehired and fired again. This site was registered by a
free lance reporter writing for Wired Magazine.
- [w][w] MTV was asleep at the wheel,
and Adam Curry, one of their DJ's registered "mtv.com," installed a
Sun workstation in his basement, and ran a T-1 link for about half a
year until MTV woke up. The McDonald's reporter was just replicating
this trick. Adam Curry split the MTV scene and opened up the Onramp, Inc.
- [w] Microsoft, Com.
is developing a gopher as well as a web to support it's customers
who have internet access. They are introducing a network service
product called The Knowledge Base.
- [w] Millipore, Inc. is a
supplier of electronic and scientific apparatus who's put their
catalog online.
- [w] Nearnet is the
internet service provider we are using today. Their web page provides
a marketing overview, while an older BBN Internet Services Corporation, as
is Palo Alto-based BARRNET.
- [o] New York Times. Although the New York Times has an an internet
connection, "nytimes.com", they do not provide any user services here.
Rather they use a service provided by on America Online.
- [w]
- [w] Pizza Hut will deliver
pizzas to folks in Santa Cruz, California.
- [g] PBS, the Public
Broadcasting Network, runs a gopher server which supports several of
its special educational offerings. The Corporation for Public
Broadcasting runs a new EdWeb
page.
- [w]
P.DEVELOPMENTS LTD [1989] publishes a manual showing how anybody
can work from home.
- Promus Hotels, has web pages for each of it's hotel chains - the
Embassy Suites, the
Hampton Inn, and the
Homewood Suites.
- [w] The Russian Trade Center
has a exposition center that links several Moscow firms. It may help
if your WWW browser speaks Russian.
- [w] The Smart Valley , a
Silicon Valley oriented "Route 128" for the Information Superhighway.
- [w] Service Merchandise .
A real shopping center on the internet. (Almost :-) At the time
writing these notes, they were not quite connected. Instead, we ended
up at web page of their internet service provider, The Edge.
- [w] Singapore, , the
intelligent island is a national project led by the Singapore
Technet with the Singapore Information Map.
- [w] Stop
Smoking
- [w] Hey! Look! A real
Surf Shop!
Not one of those phony "cybersurfing" surfing ones. It's even
got videos of the morning's surf! Lets' check it out!
- [w] David Taylor's Internet Mall
a 5 story megamall. David Taylor is the author of the Internet
Business Guide You can request a copy through email too: send a
message to 'taylor@netcom.com' with the SUBJECT 'send mall'.
- [w][g] The University of Vermont offers a Gopher Gateway and a WWW Gateway to the campus and other
Vermont sites.
- [w] A Used Car
Lot! A pretty good selection of cars, too! Right next to the
University. Wonder who got elected to the zoning commission :-)
- [e] Voyager, a favorite publisher of Macintosh CD-ROM's makes
their catalog available via e-mail. Send a request to
catalog@voyagerco.com
- [w] Wired Magazine is the
Vanity Fair of the internet generation, good reading on either a sunny
or a rainy day. Wired also offers a HotWired service. It's supposed
to be updated daily, but sometimes things seem to slip.
- [w] The
Vermont Teddy Bear Company which almost brings us home
again. Except that in the disoriented world of cyberspace, Vermont
Teddy Bear is really on a
computer in Palo Alto California!
- [g] Vermont Educational
Telecommunications Consortium. offers a gopher service for
Vermont educational institutions.
- [w] Lyndon State College
Weather reports from the Lyndon State College Meteorology
program.
- [w] Z is for Ziff, which runs
a web server and forums on America Online, Compuserve, and ...
- [w] On beyond Zebra,
- [w] are several key jumping off points, most Mosaic clients come
with built-in starting points selected by the vendor. The original CERN (European Center for Particle
Physics, Geneva, Switzerland), while the NSCA (National Center for
Supercomputing Applications), leads the way in the USA.
- [w] The daily Dr Fun
Cartoon
Construction Notes
World Wide Web data, often called pages, takes at some preparation -
with good pages taking a lot of thought. The text is "marked up" with
"tags" such as "title", "header", "paragraph", "list", and "anchor."
These tags makeup what is called "HyperText Markup Language" (HTML),
and resemble text processing languages from 15 years ago.
Gopher data take less preparation. Most files are treated as if they
are "plain text." The menu we generally see is just the names of the
files, or the names of the directories they reside in. (This makes
use of the Unix and Macintosh provision for relatively long file
names.) Non-text data, i.e. binary data for images, sounds, video
clips, are identified by their "file type", and are treated by
appropriate programs to display images, play sounds, or show movies.
Resources
Internet World Magazine, Meckler Media,
The Mosaic Handbook for Macintosh [... for MS-Windows, ... for
UNIX], Dale Dougherty and Richard Korman, O'Reilly and
Associates, Sebastapol, California, 1995. Includes a diskette with the
SpyGlass version of Mosaic.
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Wired Magazine, Wired Ventures, Ltd. For more information, send
email to "info@wired.com". For the World Wide Web version, check http://www.wired.com/. America
Online users can go to the WIRED forum.