Summary of a chat about online publications

Note, Jan 7 1996: these notes were written a year ago, back when the Web was a lot smaller. Reading this again now it seems a bit naive, dated. In a lot of ways the Web is more boring than it was before, an inevitable consequence of it being used in the same old ways as older media. The biggest exciting development is the creation of various effective Web search engines: see some other notes I've written about what that implies. Since writing this, I've become more interested in the dynamic and distributed aspects of the web.

On January 19, 1995, a few people from John Wiley and Sons came by to talk to us about online publication. Here is a summary of what I said during that conversation. My HTML notes for the talk are also online.

From nelson  Fri Jan 20 15:54:43 1995
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Subject: A talk about Web publication

You might be amused to know I talked about and demonstrated your various Web pages to a group of publishers from John Wiley and Sons. They're interested in online publication, in particular for a new science magazine associated with where I work. They asked us for advice on what an online publication could be.

As I put my presentation together a lot of interesting ideas came together in my head. If you know of a place where forward-thinking ideas about Web publication can be discussed (Usenet is too noisy), I'd be interested to hear. I'm thinking of putting together a paper summarizing my thoughts - if you know of a place to publish such a paper, other written work speculating on Web publishing, or are interested in talking about these ideas or collaborating, please get in touch with me.

I've been involved in the Web for about a year now, helping to set up three sites (www.reed.edu, www.santafe.edu, alife.santafe.edu) and writing a nice emacs mode for HTML editing (html-helper-mode). Recently I've been in charge of Artificial Life Online, an online wing of a paper journal, but am finding it very difficult to do on a volunteer-time basis.

The basic theme of my presentation was that mostly the Web is being used for publishing in the same way we've always published, only with the added convenience of being Internet accessible (and, in theory) searchable.

I made the point that the convenience is not minor: the ease of access to the LANL preprint server, for instance, makes a real difference to scientists for their research. Networth's online mutual fund search service is a big help. But fundamentally the information presentation is not novel - you still get a preprint or a page from the Morningstar report, not much different than a visit to the library.

The multimedia aspect is useful, but I think not revolutionary. I demonstrated one of the articles in PMC v5.1, a comparison of movie director's techniques. Having inlined GIFs and access to movie clips makes the article much better, but it's still mostly a (useful!) convenience.

I tried to encourage the John Wiley folks to think in new, more interesting ways to use the Web. The buzzwords for WWW are "interactive multimedia hypertext" - I feel that people (myself included) are really only taking advantage of the multimedia aspect.

I used the Geometry center (http://www.geom.umn.edu/welcome.html) as an example of what can be done with WWW interaction.w The online demos are great - they really help demonstrate mathematical concepts in a hands-on fashion. I hope to see more of that from other sites in the future (my own site included).

I also used WaxWeb as a demonstration of what one could do with hypertext (not to mention multimedia and interaction). If you haven't checked out WaxWeb, do: http://bug.village.virginia.edu/. Briefly, it's a hypertext presentation of a movie where multiple paths through the film are equally valid. At the same time, it's also a complete multimedia presentation of the film itself (sounds and movies), and it's also interactive in the sense that users can modify the hypertext structure. It's one of the most innovative things I've seen.

Like I said, I think there are a lot of interesting issues here and that the Web is now mature enough that a paper on potential uses of the technology might be appropriate. If you have any thoughts, please get in touch with me.

Thank you,
Nelson Minar http://www.santafe.edu/~nelson/

Nelson Minar <nelson@santafe.edu>

Last modified: Sun Jan 7 01:49:38 MST 1996