Article 149 of rain.general: Newsgroups: rain.general Path: ornews.intel.com!agora!psgrain!m2xenix!m2n From: randy@psg.com (Randy Bush) Subject: GNN X-M2n: psg.com Organization: Date: Sat, 18 Sep 1993 01:00:20 GMT Message-ID: Sender: @psg.com Lines: 182 Thanks, Herb. As this is a netwide game, I have subscribed and set up a local exploder. You can subscribe by sending To: lserv@psg.com Subject: From: subscribe gnn When I get the data, I will set up the local RAINet server. Thanks Herb. randy ----------- To: randy@psg.com (Randy Bush) Subject: Re: GNN server? Date: Fri, 17 Sep 93 17:35:16 PDT From: Herb Weiner Randy: GNN (Global Network Navigator) is a new service being set up by O'Reilly & Associates. To subscribe to their mailing list, send email to info@gnn.com requesting subscription information. They will email you a brief questionaire to fill out and email back, which will add you to the mailing list. The following is the first (and so far the only) newsletter: From: gnnlist@ora.com (The GNN Subscription Account) To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: First GNN Update GNN Progress Update ------------------- I want to update you on the progress of The Global Network Navigator. First, the big date: We are preparing for GNN to go online on October 1. Right now, we are preparing instructions that will help you download one of the World Wide Web clients you will need to access GNN. We will be sending out these instructions by e-mail sometime next week. We are also lining up local network providers as GNN distributors. If your Net provider runs the GNN server on his system, you will get better access and performance. Speed is still a critical factor in Internet delivery, and having multiple servers available is one approach to improve it. You can certainly help us by letting your Internet access provider know that you'd like them to provide you with local access to GNN. While we are still adding a few things to GNN Magazine, and updating the Online Whole Internet Catalog, we are spending most of our time talking to potential advertisers. This requires explaining some basic ideas about the Internet, the most important in my mind being that it is a two-way communications channel. We also have to explain our idea of content-based advertising. Perhaps you saw the recent Technology article in the Wall Street Journal that mentioned the Global Network Navigator. Below is a letter from Tim O'Reilly that he wrote in response to some people's concerns about our using advertising as a means of funding GNN. I thought you might find it interesting, as we are very much concerned that our subscribers understand our unique approach to advertising. I look forward to bringing you GNN on October 1. Dale Dougherty Publisher, Global Network Navigator dale@ora.com ************************************************** Is There a Right Way to Advertise on the Internet? We've had a number of questions from people on the Internet in response to a column in the August 27th Wall Street Journal. The article described our new Internet information center, the Global Network Navigator. The article was great, but the headline ("Internet to Get Hit with Ad Clutter") raised fears in some readers' minds that they would soon be hit with junk mail over the Internet. I wanted to take a moment to make clear that that is very far from the truth. People feel much more comfortable with the idea when they understand how it really works. In fact, I had an angry call from a customer yesterday, who started out saying he was going to boycott all our products if we were going to be running advertising on the Internet, and ended up asking how he could become an advertiser. What we're doing is creating an information service, running on our own computers or those of Internet service providers, that people can contact to retrieve information that they want, entirely under their own control. People who don't understand how the Internet works tend to think only of e-mail broadcasted to all and sundry. The headline to the article (though not the article itself) played to this misconception. But in fact, the Internet is an interactive medium, where people can use applications like gopher, WAIS and the World Wide Web (WWW) to actively seek out information that they want. The Global Network Navigator is a World Wide Web-based information service about the Internet. It contains a news section that has up-to-date information on new services available on the Net, plus a magazine that contains feature articles giving in-depth background on useful services. It also contains an online version of the catalog portion of Ed Krol's bestselling book, "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog". What makes GNN so exciting to users is that it's not just a magazine about the Internet, it's an easy to use interface to it. Using a WWW client such as NCSA's Mosaic, people don't have to type cryptic commands or long, obscure filenames; they can simply click on a button to retrieve files or visit an Internet service. Hypertext links in news items, articles, and catalog entries take you not only to other parts of GNN but out to other servers on the Net. You follow the links you're interested in, and only the articles you want to read are actually transferred over the Net from the server to your WWW client. The Marketplace section works exactly the same way. We're working with advertisers to create Resource Centers consisting of useful information about their products. GNN readers can simply browse the Marketplace using a WWW client, just like they do other parts of GNN. They can also use the search function to look for particular kinds of information...or they can follow hypertext links from sponsorship icons associated with other parts of GNN to specific Marketplace entries. The point is that what information a customer retrieves is entirely under his or her control. We firmly believe that people on the Net are interested in solid, detailed information about commercial products. They don't want unsolicited advertising, but they do want to be able to retrieve information that they are looking for--and that includes commercial information as well as free information. The real beauty of this kind of Internet-based advertising becomes clear in contrast to what happens in typical paper-based industry trade publications. Someone reads an article or advertisement of interest, and then circles a number on a "bingo card" that is sent to the publication, and from there on to the advertiser. Some weeks (or in some cases months) later, the customer gets an information packet from the advertiser. The packet may or may not contain what the person wanted. By contrast, in GNN, the person can follow a link to information instantaneously. What's more, an advertiser can provide far more than a glossy brochure that leads to yet another request for still more information. A company's GNN Marketplace Resource Center might include a company background, detailed product literature, specifications, technology white papers, price lists (always up-to-date), text of reviews, software demos, names and contact information for local sales representatives, and a host of other information that is far too voluminous to send out in response to every casual inquiry. People are justly skeptical of advertising because in many media, where space is at a premium, getting attention has become more important than actual content. People don't trust what companies are telling them. What we are trying to establish in the GNN Marketplace is a framework where companies can provide high quality information to their customers, and those customers can respond right away and let companies know whether or not the information is useful. It's very important for those who want to commercialize the Net to realize that there is a culture of the Internet and that to publish or to advertise on the Internet, one has to respect that culture and find a place to work within it. In many ways, this is like creating a community newspaper. Advertisers and readers are part of the same community. In this kind of community, advertising has to provide real value, not just a distracting attempt to gain attention. We believe that what we're doing with advertising in GNN is not only not "ad clutter" but actually defines a new paradigm for Internet commercialization. Everyone is looking for new value-added services on the Internet, and without government subsidies, someone has to pay for them. An advertiser- supported publication like GNN is a win-win situation for everybody. It lets us develop a rich information resource for the Internet while at the same time providing a non-intrusive way for advertisers to work with this new medium. -- Tim