Social Web, building blocks, by Richard Seltzer

Chapter 1: Basic building blocks of the Social Web

by Richard Seltzer , seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

For information about "flypaper", see the introduction at www.samizdat.com/socintro.html

This is the first chapter of a book entitled The Social Web. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this item for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.

My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.

Ironically, the same factors that make it increasingly difficult to grow an on-line community, also foster social interaction on the Web.

The proliferation of personal Web pages and the availability of full-text search engines increased the choices available to users and increased their independence -- hence undermining efforts to build audience loyalty. But the combination of personal Web pages and full-text search engines also led to unexpected social effects, such as "flypaper," which we discussed in the Introduction.

Meanwhile, changes in PCs and in Web browsers have also increased choice and independence, further diluting user attention, and have at the same time helped make the Web far more social.

Before the Web, the primary applications on the Internet were highly interactive. People connected to one another by email, by newsgroups, and by chat. But each of these applications was separate, and the PCs of that time only let you run one of them at a time. If you were doing email, you'd have to close that to start up your newsreader or your chat software.

The earliest Web browsers let you access ftp and gopher servers as well as Web sites -- but the target all of those applications was documents, not people. Later versions of browsers added email and newsreaders, with ever greater functionality and ease of use. Software appeared that let users engage in chat and forum (also known as bulletin-board, notes or conferencing) and also access databases all from a Web browser. And new desktop Internet applications were typically released as "plug-ins" which you run from your browser. In short order, what had started as just another desktop Internet application became your single entry point to just about everything you wanted to do on the Internet.

At the same time, the average PC became ever more powerful and faster, and capable of running multi-tasking operating systems like Windows 95 and NT. This means that the typical PC user today (like the user of an expensive UNIX workstation a few years ago) can run more than one Web browser session at a time (perhaps chatting in one window while checking out related material on other Web sites in a second window) or can keep a telnet or an email session going separately while using the Web. In other words. you have a wide variety of ways in which you could carry on lively discussions and at the same time check documents on the Web.

Multi-tasking PCs give users the independence to do more than one thing at a time -- to "be" many different places on the Internet at the same time, to connect with both documents and people at the same time. And multi-function browsers, which have a wide range of applications built-in, give users greater choice. They no longer need to acquire and learn half a dozen or more separate applications -- they are all there in the browser, expanding the choices that everyone has available.

If you are on the Web, you no longer have to exit your browser and start another application to interact with people. The social applications of the pre-Web era have become part of the Web, transforming it from its document-centric origins to today's Social Web.

Novice users often don't realize the range of choices available to them. But veterans typically operate with numerous sessions running at the same time, maybe only one or two windows open, but the rest of the applications chugging along in the background, either doing some work that takes time to complete (like downloading) or ready with a click to take center stage, for instance with a newly arrived email message.

This multitasking environment is another reason why it is so difficult for a Web site today to grow into a full-fledged community. Even when a user is at your site, he or she could be simultaneously accessing one or more other Web sites and checking email. Unlike the days when users did one thing at a time -- for instance, focused totally on a notes conference -- today you may never have that person's undivided attention.

At the same time, the repertoire of ways and combination of ways to socially interact over the Internet have expanded greatly; and your Web pages can become the launching points and points of intersection and storage places for heated discussions that are very important for your target audience.

In this chapter, we'll look at basic social Internet applications that flourished before the Web -- newsgroups, email, etc. -- and how they can and should be used in today's Web environment.

What does this mean for you?

If you are a newcomer to the Web, these are the basics you should familiarize yourself with before getting caught up in the hype and glitter of the latest software.

If you already have a personal Web site or run a tiny business off the Web, attention to these often-neglected fundamentals might inspire you to change the ways you do what you do.

If you are planning on building an on-line business around "community," you should adjust your expectations and goals and, at the same time, take full advantage of the social aspects of the Web to build your audience.

Newsgroups

Before the advent of the World Wide Web, newsgroups were probably the most vital and exciting part of the Internet. They are still a good place to go if you need help or want to help or want to share information with and make friends with people whose interests are similar to yours. Anyone interested in the Social Web should look carefully at how they work, how they attract and hold audiences, and how people behave there. And, as we'll discuss below, you can embed hyperlinks to newsgroups and searches of newsgroups in your Web pages.

If you haven't used newsgroups before, prepare yourself for a very different kind of experience. While Web pages tend to be carefully constructed, edited, and formatted, newsgroup postings are typically informal and often spontaneous. They resemble electronic mail in length and style, only they're addressed to a group rather than an individual. The group of regular readers might be as small as a few hundred or as large as 100,000. A few groups are "moderated," which means that someone decides what does and doesn't get included. But most are wide open and welcome postings from everyone -- so long as the messages are relevant to the target subject matter and consistent with the spirit of the group, as well as the general Internet culture. Typically, the ratio of people who just read the newsgroups to those who sometimes post is about 10:1 -- but the knowledge that you could at any time respond -- either directly by email to the poster or to the newsgroup itself -- gives a sense of immediacy, belonging, and participation even to those who never get around to writing.

The information in newsgroups tends to be fresher, more transitory, and often more opinionated than that on corporate Web pages. The best newsgroup items are sometimes re-posted on Web pages. But if you are doing research or need up-to-the minute information or need to know what people are thinking and saying about you or your company, this is where you should look.

There are newsgroups on everything from books, to the culture of Nepal, to obscure variations of UNIX and unusual sexual practices. There are over 16,000 different news groups, some of which have hundreds of new postings every day.

The typical newsgroup devotee uses one of a variety of public domain software packages that helps them maneuver through this material with varying degrees of ease. The typical "reader" software keeps track of the items you have already seen, alerts you of new ones, and lets you "subscribe" to certain groups -- meaning that those are the groups it will immediately bring to your attention.

Except in relatively rare moderated groups, there is no editor at all. No one intervenes to polish words and sentences. No one double-checks spelling and syntax. No one, except the person who wrote it, decides whether an item should be included. If you like your information pre-digested and neatly packaged and branded with the stamp of approval of some well-known corporation, you probably don't want to venture here. If you have difficulty making judgments on your own about the accuracy of facts and the cogency of arguments, you'd better stick to the standard media. Let the user beware.

Newsgroups are the wild west -- frontier territory and a law unto themselves.

Post an advertisement or anything that smells like an advertisement to a newsgroup that has a non-commercial purpose, and you're likely to get hate mail from hundreds or even thousands of people -- some of whom might even be angry enough to start up automatic mailers intended to flood your mail box.

This is their watering hole. They welcome and will share with anyone who respects the purpose of the group and the sensitivities of its members. And they will not abide anyone polluting that common water.

But ask an obscure question which is relevant to the topic of a particular group, and you're likely to get a couple dozen answers within a day or two, from people all over the world, going out of their way to help a stranger, with no expectation of payment or reward.

Here are a few personal examples, from the pre-Web days.

1) My daughter, Heather, needed to write a paper for school about a woman mathematician. She had no names to start with, and librarians were stumped by the request. I posted the question in the newsgroup sci.math; and within two days, I received replies from 60 individuals from around the world. Many of the people who answered were in universities; some were professors. They provided the names of over two dozen prominent women mathematicians, brief biographies of many of them, and very complete bibliographic references.

2) The daughter of a friend at work had to get a recipe from Nepal, as a school assignment. I posted the question in soc.culture.nepal. (Yes, the Nepalese have their own newsgroup). Within a day, I received a recipe from a Nepalese student at the University of Western Australia, and the phone number of a student from Nepal who was attending MIT.

3) A friend of my wife's worked for the U.S. office of a Norwegian fish company. They were finding that sales of salmon to restaurants in the Boston area were hampered by the fact that the fish had not gone through kosher inspection at the point of origin. She wanted to locate a conservative Orthodox rabbi who could perform such inspections in Norway. I posted to soc.culture.jewish and also to a Digital Notes File called BAGELS and within a day I had the name and number of two individuals who could do the job. One works out of New York and flies around the world; the other, who lives in Norway, now does the inspections for them.

Today, this kind of behavior continues on the Internet, but it is the exception rather than the norm. Thanks to the existence of tens of millions of Web pages and full-text search engines, like AltaVista, (which we'll discuss in greater detail later), people tend to operate differently. Rather than post a question to a newsgroup and wait a day or two to get answers from people kind enough to take the time, you use AltaVista to get an answer right away. At AltaVista you can in seconds search either the entire public Web or all recent newsgroup (Usenet) postings. That saves you time; it saves hassle on the part of all the people who would have tried to help you; and it saves network resources as well. In the first months after AltaVista came on line, thousands of newsgroups postings were of the form -- "You asked this question. Here's the answer. I found it on AltaVista. Why not try there first next time." Since then, such reminders have been less necessary.

This change of behavior is a mixed blessing, because that pattern of direct human interaction and people going out of their way to help one another is an important part of the Internet culture. It's not only good to get answers; it feels good to do the helping. And that's how strangers in distant countries with common interests come to know one another. While the convenience of AltaVista is great, I can't help but be nostalgic for those earlier, much less hurried days.

At the same time, the combination of personal Web pages and full-text search engines opens new social and interactive opportunities. In the past, if I wanted feedback on a story or article in progress, I would post it to a newsgroup like alt.prose. Today, I can post that same item on my personal Web site, and submit that page to the index at AltaVista and other search engines; and by so doing I open my writing up to comments from a much larger and more diverse audience.

This is an extension of the "flypaper" concept discussed in the Introduction. Web pages that in terms of technology are "static" can in fact be presented as works in progress and hence as invitations for discussion -- attracting people with similar interests who use search engines to navigate the Web.

Instead of carefully polishing and getting official approval/blessing for every document you wish to publish on the Web, post an early draft of your article or story, post your reactions to what you have read, and post notes from provocative meetings. If a thought is important to you, it may well be of importance to others. And if the full text of your pages is indexed by search engines like AltaVista, interested people will find those pages and hence find you.

Posting a document as a "work in progress" begs for comment. Promising to post in the same place the most interesting and relevant reactions (sent by email), provides further encouragement to open up a dialogue. It takes no special software to get a discussion going -- just interesting and provocative content and the willingness to talk about it before it is completely finished. What was just an article or memo becomes an invitation for feedback from people interested in learning about and understanding the same subject in collaboration with one another, sharing experiences and insights -- the kind of dialogue that formal education sometimes strives for, but very rarely achieves.

And like an open-minded and creative teacher, you learn from the insights of others and also from the new perspectives and thoughts of your own that are stimulated by the questions and comments of others.

Notes conferences at Digital Equipment

While newsgroups flourished on the early Internet, similar kinds of discussions were carried on over other separate networks and bulletin board systems, many of which later became part of the Internet. The discussion conferences at the Well in the late 1980s and early 1990s have become renowned because so many of the participants have written books and articles about their experience (in particular, The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold and Rules of the Net by Thomas Mandel and Gerard Van der Leun). The VAXnotes Conferences at Digital Equipment were far more numerous than the ones at the Well, and extremely rich in content; but to access them you had to be a Digital employee.

At its peak, before the massive layoffs in the early 1990s, Digital had over 130,000 employees, all of whom had access to these conferences -- thousands of them, each of which had hundreds or thousands of archived messages and replies and replies to replies. The vast majority of these conferences had closed restricted membership and were directly related to work, but hundreds were open to all employees and were devoted to personal interests -- everything from woodworking and cars to the Digital corporate culture and classified ads. Because it was a closed, known environment -- we all worked for the same company and could easily get in touch with one another. That basic level of trust made possible the rudiments of electronic commerce long before the invention of elaborate on-line security software. We simply posted classified ads for the used goods we wanted to sell, and got in touch with one another over the corporate email system or by phone. Over the course of 11 years, I bought three cars this way -- every one of which was a bargain that I was still delighted with a couple years later.

In some cases, Digital notes files covered topics that were similar to particular newsgroups, and if you worked for Digital and had that interest, you'd probably keep an eye on and participate in both. For instance, a notes conference at Digital (PROSE) and a newsgroup on the Internet (alt.prose) were both devoted to creative writing -- serving as the electronic equivalent of self-help writers' groups. Participants posted their own stories and commented on those of others. They freely and openly gave their time and effort to help one another improve their writing and find markets. Because this wasn't a face-to-face encounter, and because most of the participants did not know one another personally, the criticism tended to be painfully honest, which is what most writers need and crave. The words were judged on their own merit.

Sometimes participants who lived close to one another arranged for face-to-face social get-togethers. Then when they moved back to the electronic realm, their messages took on a more personal tone. But when it came to critical judgment, the network still fostered impartial candor.

Many of the joys of the early Internet and its forerunners came from the fact that everything didn't have to be structured and organized. You didn't have to ask and wait for permission from some authority. In many cases, you could simply exercise your imagination and initiative, within the bounds of good sense and good taste.

When my son Bobby wrote a high school history paper on "The Role of Bobby Fischer as a Cold War Symbol," I thought that maybe some of the people who read rec.games.chess might be interested in reading it. So I posted a brief message there and also in the Digital chess conference asking if anyone would like me to send a copy electronically. (He had written it using our word processor at home, so it was a simple matter to transfer it up to the network and send it.) About 70 people from all over the world asked for it. A couple dozen replied directly once they had read it. Most were complimentary and grateful. Some pointed out minor inaccuracies: a typo in a date and a footnote number omitted from the text. One person took issue with a peripheral statement in the footnotes and started a discussion on that in the newsgroup. Bobby fixed the mistakes, acknowledged them in the newsgroup, and offered to send the revised copy to any who asked.

In other words, in this early electronic environment, it was possible for an article or paper which deals cogently with a topic of general interest, to undergo informal peer review on the network, to be forwarded and copied many times all over the world, and to be shared freely by all who are interested.

Notes conferences were also a place where people all over the world could gather to play interactive strategy games, some of which generated lots of intense activity and lasted months. Back when my son and I were involved in a 17-player variant of the game Diplomacy in a Digital notes conference, an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor pointed out that we needed a game more complex than chess to model our modern world, to exercise our strategic and tactical thinking and build the negotiating skills needed for survival, ("Chess for the Era of Desert Storm" by Mark Katz, Aug. 5, 1991). Diplomacy fills many of these requirements. Each player represents a European country; and the game is won on the basis of negotiating skills, rather than chance. (The game map which has such country names as "Serbia" and "Ukraine," looks much more contemporary today than it did when we were playing in 1991.)

The other players, all of whom worked for Digital, were scattered around the U.S. and Europe. Most of the players had never met one another and knew nothing about one another except what they learned from the private electronic correspondence that flowed rapidly and regularly among them.

The board game allows 15 minutes between moves for the participants to talk to one another privately and make deals. A complete game typically takes less than 12 hours. Over the network, we had a week between moves, and the negotiations and alliances became far more complex and interesting. The moves themselves and messages from the moderator were posted in a "notes file," a common file space which everyone could access. Secret alliances of more than two players set up separate notes files to speed their negotiations with one another. False alliances were also formed -- where two or more parties invited one or more others under the pretext that they would work together long-term, but with secret agreements and separate discussions on when and how to "stab" the invitees. This particular game (CHAOS III) lasted about four months, led to the generation of many hundreds of pages of very creative persuasive writing, and ended in a three-way tie.

While not intended as an educational experience, this game was far more effective than a course in negotiation skills for managers. It also helped me learn how to make full use of notes files and electronic mail as a business tool -- to help people at remote sites work together as a team, and to arrive at agreement on strategies and policies with a minimum of face-to-face meetings.

In the process of playing, my son and I learned a lot about how people behave in the electronic environment. My son, Bobby, who was 15 then and is a National Master in chess, was the real player. I acted as the go-between, connecting to the network by modem to relay the correspondence he wrote on our word processor. It was interesting watching him learn how to influence and persuade adults on the other side of the world who had no idea who he was, or what his age was. The sex, color of skin, culture, and physical looks of the participants also had no effect on the course of the game. All that mattered was the words transmitted electronically: how cogent the arguments were, and how well they were expressed.

This experience brought home to me that the network was a leveling mechanism, helping create a more democratic workplace today at Digital Equipment, and that as networks like this became more generally accessible, the same effect could spread to large parts of society, around the world.

While this game was going on, correspondence from the other players alternated with electronic news on the Gulf War, the attempted coup in the Soviet Union, and messages from a friend of mine in Moscow. There was an uncanny realism to this role-play game.

When shocking events occur in remote parts of the world, first-hand accounts are rapidly disseminated over the Internet -- not what the New York Times chooses to publish, or what the television networks use to fill the time between commercials, but what the student with a PC in Sarajevo sees through his window as the shelling continues in his neighborhood. Events like the massacre at Tianamen Square, the Gulf War, and the civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia have triggered huge volumes of traffic on the Internet -- much of it opinion from the uninformed, but interspersed with nuggets of true insight and clear first-hand description. And the senders of these messages from the heart of the trouble spot can use the Internet to stay in touch with what is happening elsewhere in the world and how the rest of the world is reacting to and responding to their crisis. They can also be answered directly by electronic mail, and can sometimes forward messages to and for their neighbors.

Today Digital no longer exists, having been swallowed by Compaq in 1998. The former Digital employees who still remain at Compaq are connected to the Internet. This means that they have access through their Web browsers to all the information riches of the public Internet and also have access to over a million documents on the company's internal Internet (or intranet) which is sealed off from the outside world with security software and measures known as a "fire wall." In this new environment, some of the old notes conferences are still going. . Employees now access the notes in a very different manner, with their Web browsers, and have far more information and social choices competing for their attention; but among the old guard, the interactive, social, sharing culture continues in the old notes conferences, and among the old and the new a similar culture is perpetuated through Web-based activities and email distribution lists.

Mailing lists

In addition to person-to-person correspondence and newsgroups, a huge number of free electronic publications flow daily over the Internet. You can get chess magazines, science fiction fanzines, and scholarly journals, which in content and style differ little if at all from what you might find in print. In many cases the distribution list is automatically generated and maintained using special software. One simply sends a mail message to the right address in the right format to get added to or deleted from the list of subscribers.

As a variant of that approach, some electronic "publications" are all-inclusive and unedited, consisting of electronic correspondence on a common topic that has been gathered automatically or by a moderator, for redistribution to a list of "subscribers." In some cases, individual messages are redistributed separately rather than combined.

Kidsphere, started by Professor Bob Carlitz at the University of Pittsburgh, uses this capability to resend to everyone who has asked to be put on the list any message sent to the main Kidsphere address. These same messages are also posted as a newsgroup (for those who prefer to read them that way rather than as mail). In practice a huge community has grown -- K-12 teachers and students all over the world sharing useful tips and the wonders they have uncovered in exploring the vast and rapidly growing resources of the Internet.

A community of enthusiasts from a wide variety of academic disciplines, Kidsphere participants on a typical day might include a high school teacher from New Zealand getting his students involved in a weather project; a biology teacher from England looking for courseware she could use on a Macintosh; or a third-grade teacher in Detroit looking for electronic penpals for his class. They tell how to use the Internet to freely access the catalogues of major libraries around the world or how to log in to public files at NASA in Huntsville, Alabama. They also promote the projects of their students, who are starting their own electronic newspapers or need practice writing in foreign languages.

The enthusiasm and the diversity of interests is awe-inspiring, and the volume of the messages (an average of about 50 a day, some of which can run many pages) is simply too much for any one person to absorb. Projects overlap. One effort helps another. People who run large computer centers let their machines be used as repositories for information and software and provide free and open access to anyone on the network anywhere in the world.

Kidsphere continues by email and in newsgroups today, supplemented by activity on the Web. You can read their basic documents about who they are and how it works at their Web site (http://info.pps.pgh.pa.us/publications/articles/sphere/sphere.html), and nearly 900 different Web pages mention the project and point interested people in that direction.

Complete books by ftp, gopher, or Web

When saying that the Web is moving from a document-to-document to a people-to-people emphasis, I don't want to underplay the importance of documents. In some cases what you really want is a text -- perhaps an entire book, or perhaps, in the case of some government documents, like the US Budget, a text that is so large that printing it would be ridiculously costly, especially considering that the electronic form is far easier to search and use.

In pre-Web days, large texts were made available over the Internet through archival software -- either ftp (file-transfer protocol) or gopher. Such document repositories still exist and can be accessed with special ftp or gopher software or from a Web browser. The electronic texts at such sites are typically (but not always) in plain text (ASCII) form -- without any fancy word processing or publishing-style formatting. Plain text can be used by anybody with a computer; while formatted text requires that you have particular software packages to decipher it.

Today, many of the world's greatest books are now in electronic form, sitting in open files (ftp, gopher, and Web), intended for anyone who wishes to copy and redistribute them anywhere, at no cost. In about two minutes you can copy the entire King James Bible from a computer on the other side of the continent.

The most orderly and disciplined effort to make great works readily available in this form to libraries, schools and individuals is known as the Gutenberg Project. Their selections include the 1990 Census, Roget's Thesaurus, and the 1991 CIA Book of Facts, as well as such literary works as Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, and Wuthering Heights. Other systems have the complete works of Shakespeare. New books are being input and carefully proofread every day by dedicated individuals who donate their time and effort to this cause.

Today, dozens of other projects have similar, complementary, and overlapping goals. The proponents of these free public on-line repositories of electronic texts share their experiences and concerns over an email distribution list called Bookpeople (spok+bookpeople-request@cs.cmu.edu). So while access to documents -- etexts of classic works -- is the goal, a proto-community has grown of people who care about such documents. They link with one another by email, by distribution lists like Bookpeople, by electronic newsletters like Gutenberg's, by hyper-linking their sites to one another, and sometimes by offering one another free space on their machines to make it easier for people in different parts of the world, with limited slow Internet access, to get to their works.

These projects are near to my heart. "Why?" my son asks. "What good is it?" Michael Hart, who runs the Gutenberg Project has said that he wants to have over a 1000 great books in electronic form, so they can be provided free over the network or for negligible cost on compact disk to libraries everywhere. I can easily imagine a high school English teacher giving everyone in the class a floppy disk with Wuthering Heights and asking them to rewrite a chapter or two; or a drama teacher using an electronic copy of Hamlet to edit it down for a two-hour high school production and print out copies for the whole cast.

But the real source of my enthusiasm is far more impractical. I like to look up at the shelf above my personal computer and know that in those floppy disks I have Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, The Heart of Darkness, The Federalist Papers, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution. Somehow, irrationally, I sleep better at night knowing that electronic copies of works like these are scattered throughout the world, and that they can be sent in seconds to thousands of new destinations. It gives me a sense of comfort to think that as long as there are free and open international computer networks, book burning is a futile exercise.

telnet -- working at a distance

Back in 1989, I posted a request in the newsgroup rec.games.chess: "I have a unique set of chess games that might be of value to research in artificial intelligence or to developers of chess-playing software. I have been saving my son Bobby's games as word processing files since the very first rated game he played in Oct. 1984. There are now 680 rated games on file -- a continuous record from 9-year-old raw beginner to 14-year-old master. I believe that analysis of these games could provide valuable information about how one can learn and improve rapidly at chess. In the best of all possible world, I could foresee a valuable collaboration. "

I soon got a reply from Bob Levinson, assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). Funded by the National Science Foundation, his chess-playing program, Morph, was a departure from the "brute-force" programs that have recently captured the headlines for their accomplishments against human grand masters. Those machines use high speed circuits to search deeply through many possible lines of play. Morph on the other hand "learns from its mistakes." It's already a competent player, and it gets better from its own experience, rather than from humans specifically telling it how to evaluate a particular position and what move is best in such-and-such a case. He was interested in using Bobby's games to "train" Morph, and having Bobby act as a consultant on the project.

I was able to send all the games (about a thousand pages of text) very quickly over the Internet. Later we sent him Bobby's new games as they were and Bob Levinson and Bobby carried on an intermittent dialogue about the project through electronic mail.

The following summer Bobby had an account on a computer at UCSC which he could access over the Internet (using the "telnet" command) from the word processor in the basement of our house in Boston. That made it possible for him to play a more active role in the project, working on-line at a distance of 3,000 miles.

The importance of this capability was made clear to me later that year at a press conference with Russian officials at DECWORLD in Boston. The Chairman of the State Committee on Informatics and the director of a top scientific institute in Moscow described the current crisis in Russian science.

Jump-starting the free-market economy led to an exchange rate that meant a typical Russian scientist earned the equivalent of about $200 -- not $200 a week or even a month, but $200 a year. Naturally, with the end of restrictions on emigration, the temptation to leave for lucrative employment in the West was tremendous. And those scientists who stayed found themselves isolated from the world scientific community.

Before, thanks to government subsidies, scientists could travel to conferences and had access to all the latest scientific literature. Now, because of economics, they were cut off. A year's subscription to a western technical journal could cost the equivalent of one year's salary. And round-trip airfare to New York, to attend a conference, would cost the equivalent of four years' salary.

Communication is the life-blood of science. Without it, Russian science would fall behind the rest of the world and become second-rate, unable to make significant contributions, and unable to prepare succeeding generations of top-level scientists. This would be a loss not just for Russia, but for the world.

"What about the Internet?" I asked. For the last couple years I have corresponded with a friend in Moscow over the Internet. I presumed that those who had access would be able to use it like we do here, as a gateway to tremendous libraries of information and a link with the worldwide scientific community.

But the telecommunications infrastructure in Russia was antiquated and unreliable. Messages from the Internet could get through, but it took a day or two for them to arrive and, typically, a third were lost due to technical difficulties and inefficiency. And the more sophisticated capabilities, such as access to distant computers, either weren't available or weren't practical because of the slowness of response.

Long-term, they have to rebuild their telecommunications infrastructure, which will take many years and huge investments from western governments and businesses. But immediately, to preserve and revitalize serious top-level science in their country, they needed high-speed links between key institutes in Russia and the Internet. With such links, Russian scientists could stay in touch with other leaders in their fields and keep up to date on the latest developments at low cost. And opportunities would rapidly open up for them to do significant work for foreign businesses at a distance, over the network. That way western businesses could benefit from their knowledge and talents, and the scientists would be able to earn western currency while staying in their homeland.

Yes, for Russia, work at a distance is more than a curiosity and a game. And, as I learned just a few days ago from another Internet contact, the problems of five years ago are still critical today.

An old friend, Claude Thau, had met someone from St. Petersburg, Russia, on a train to Austria; and knowing my interest in Russia, he got us in touch with one another by email. Since then Natalia Nemzer has participated in my weekly chat session about Business on the Worldwide Web, corresponded with me frequently by email, and also has read and responded to Internet-related articles of mine which I have posted at my Web site. One of those articles included the above observations about Russia and need for work-at-a-distance. She responded, "From its writing five years have passed already. Now in Russia the condition with science has practically not varied. It even has become worse in many respects. Probably, Internet became a savior for some large scientific institutes. But research workers like me did not know of these capabilities. As a result, my scientific institute in Ekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) in the Urals, that was engaged in research in the field of practical metallurgy and heat treatment, no longer exists. Practically all my former colleagues work now in other fields. Of the 50 people I worked with only one person continues to be engaged in this field of research -- and that's me. But for the last few years, certainly, I have fallen significantly backward form the research accumulated in the world. Now I hope to catch up.

"On the other hand, the capabilities accumulated by our group in the field of heat treatment of manufacturing rolls has practical value. In May of this year we visited one such corporation in Germany. Now I carry out some calculations for them. (Such calculations are very expensive in Germany.) Just yesterday, at my request, they let me know their email address for more active communications. That will be very convenient for transmitting the results of calculations and research (texts, tables, and photos).

"As you wrote, it is wonderful that through the Internet everybody can possess the best books of mankind if one has a computer on his desktop. These best books have passed through a filter: they have been selected by many generations of people, by eliminating a huge quantity of printed books, and also through the people executing such projects as Gutenberg. I suppose that very soon all researchers will place their new results on the Internet. Then it will be possible to create a storehouse of the most valuable knowledge in different fields. Teams of highly qualified experts within any community could execute this role of filter (maybe this process is in progress even now).

"The capabilities you write about in your book should become very useful in helping in creating and operating such groups.

"Now I think about it with hope. Our group of researchers, young and qualified specialists engaged in the creation of new engineering processes and equipment for heat treatment over many years have achieved valuable practical results. I managed this activity of making a computer program that absorbed the transactions of many people. It is not our fault that in our country these results are not necessary now. I feel the huge responsibility, and do not want these efforts to be transformed into dust. I think that the Internet can help us. The process of research, of comprehending should not be interrupted."

Internet applications merge

What had been separate Internet applications requiring separate software -- ftp, gopher, newsgroups, chat, email -- are all now accessible from a Web browser -- and can all be merged into your Web site. The very same files might be available as Web pages, on ftp servers, on gopher servers, in newsgroups, and over email distribution lists. Dialogues begun through one channel are continued and expanded through others (as my dialogue with Natalia Nemzer, noted above).

For instance, over the last few years, newsgroups which had been totally separate from the Web, have begun to be integrated into the Web. That's one of the factors that is making the Web more of a social environment and less just a huge library of documents.

If your Internet service provider offers newsgroups and you have the options in your browser set up properly, pointing to the right news server, you can read and post to newsgroups and send email to individuals who have posted to newsgroups, all directly from your Web browser (for instance, to get to the "books" newsgroup you would enter the address in the form news:rec.arts.books or click on a hyper-link that is associated with that address). And free search services such as AltaVista (http://www.altavista.digital.com) and Dejanews (http://www.dejanews.com) let you search across all newsgroups and read the items directly there, without newsreader software and without having to mess with your browser settings.

Also, because of the ever-expanding number of newsgroups and volume of material available in them, they were beginning to collapse from their own weight. With newsreader software, even those who love the newsgroup experience could only find the time to keep track of what is happening in at most a different dozen groups. So they were missing all the good information and interaction that was right at the heart of their interests but was happening in other groups. Now, thanks to search engines like AltaVista and Dejanews, you can search across all the newsgroups or a subset of them for a subject, a phrase, a person -- whatever you want, whenever you want it. And with AltaVista, you can, with your Web browser, bookmark the results of your query, so you can launch the same query again whenever you like and get updated results. And whatever an individual can do by hand with a Web browser, a Web site can make easier for their visitors through hyperlinks. (We'll provide details on that later.)

In other words, the underlying capabilities and culture of the Internet continue, but how you access those capabilities -- the commands and procedures -- change over time. Today, all these capabilities are accessible through a single piece of software -- a Web browser. And at the same time, some of these applications link to one another for smooth transitions, as if they were all a single computing environment. For instance, many kinds of email make it easy for you to jump straight to the Web, by clicking on hyperlinks embedded in email messages. And within Web pages, "mailto:" links launch email messages to pre-set addresses. And links within chat can let you send private email to a participant or check a participants Web site while the chat is in session. As a result of these overlapping and complementary capabilities, our concept of the Web has grown and changed -- away from just documents and toward social interaction.

In the future, a wide range of capabilities that today we associate with the Web will also be built into operating systems software and into common PC applications. Already, with Word for Office 97 (and earlier versions of Word with a free Internet Assistant software patch from Microsoft), you can embed hyperlinks in word processing documents and go straight to a Web page by clicking on such a link. And already many PC video games have Web-play extensions. You can expect that increasingly the distinction between your computer and the world's network will blur, and what once were separate, personal activities performed on your isolated computer will become part of a much larger environment (with varying levels of security for information and activities which you want to be private) -- the follow-on to today's Social Web. John Donne would love that world in which truly no man will be an island...

Chapter 2

The rest of The Social Web by Richard Seltzer

Web Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs, and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002). No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve online business success. Reviews.

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