The Online World — Background and Themes

er 7. If your name is Jens Jensen, and you want to subscribe to SOVNET-L, send this message through the Internet (assuming that NDSUM1 is your nearest LISTSERV host):

To: LISTSERV@NDSUVM1.BITNET Subject: (You can write anything here. Will be ignored.) Text: SUB SOVNET-L Jens Jensen

When your subscription has been registered, you will receive a confirmation. From this date, all messages sent to the list will be forwarded to your mailbox. (Send "SIGNOFF SOVNET-L" to this address, when you have had enough.) Some lists will forward each message to you upon receipt. Others will send a periodic digest (weekly, monthly, etc.). To send a message to SOVNET-L, send to the BITNET address in column two above. Send to

SOVNET-L@INDYCMS.BITNET

Review the following example. Most BITNET lists will accept these commands.

Example: Subscription to the China list --------------------------------------- CHINA-NN is listed like this in the List of Lists:

CHINA-NN CHINA-NN@ASUACAD China News Digest (Global News)

Scandinavians may subscribe to CHINA-NN by Internet mail to LISTSERV@FINHUTC.BITNET . North American users may send their mail to LISTSERV@NDSUVM1.BITNET . If your name is Winston Hansen, write the following command in the TEXT of the message

SUB CHINA-NN Winston Hansen

When you want to leave CHINA-NN, send a cancellation message like this:

To: LISTSERV@NDSUVM1.BITNET Subject: (nothing here) SIGNOFF CHINA-NN

NOTE: Send the cancellation command to the address you used, when subscribing! If you subscribed through LISTSERV@FINHUTC, sending the SIGNOFF command to LISTSERV@NDSUVM1 will get you nowhere. Send to LISTSERV@FINHUTC. Never send the SIGNOFF command to the discussion list itself! Always send to the LISTSERV.

Monitoring the action --------------------- THINKNET is an online magazine forum dedicated to "thoughtfulness in the cybertime environment." It brings reviews of significant and thought-provoking exchanges within our new electronic nation. This electronic publication is free. If you're interested in philosophy, subscribe by sending a message through Internet to thinknet@world.std.com . Write the following in the TEXT of the message:

SEND THINKNET TO Your-Full-Name AT UserId@Your-Internet-Email-Address

Example: If your email address is opresno@extern.uio.no and your name Odd de Presno, use the following command:

SEND THINKNET TO Odd de Presno AT OPRESNO@EXTERN.UIO.NO

THINKNET is also available through the Philosophy conference on The Well, and on GEnie in the Philosophy category under the Religion and Ethics Bulletin Board. (Hard copy versions can be bought through THINKNET, PO BOX 8383, Orange CA 92664-8383, U.S.A.). If you're on The Well, read the topic "News from Around Well Conferences" to learn about new developments. These are some mailing lists that may help you locate sources of interest:

NETSCOUT (NETSCOUT@VMTECMEX) The BITnet/Internet scouts. Subscribe by email to LISTSERV@VMTECMEX.BITNET with the following in the TEXT of your message SUB NETSCOUT yourfirstname yourlastname

This is where you can discuss and exchange information about servers, FTP sites, Filelists, lists, tools, and any related aspects.

HELP-NET (HELP-NET@TEMPLEVM) BITNET/CREN/INTERNET Help Resource. Send email to LISTSERV@TEMPLEVM.BITNET with the text SUB HELP-NET yourfirstname yourlastname

The list's main purpose is to help solve user problems with utilities and software related to the Internet and BITNET networks. The library contains several good help files for novice networkers. A great place for new Internet users!

Other sources available through the Internet -------------------------------------------- The Interest Groups List of Lists is available by electronic mail from mail-server@nisc.sri.com . Send a message with the following text in the message body:

Send netinfo/interest-groups

Note that as of April 1993, the file was over 1,100,000 bytes in size. It will be returned to you in moderately sized pieces. You can search the List of Lists by email. Say you're looking for a mailing list related to Robotics. To find out, send a message to LISTSERV@VM1.NODAK.EDU containing the following commands:

//ListSrch JOB Echo=No Database Search DD=Rules //Rules DD * search robotics in lists index search robotics in intgroup index search robotics in new-list index

Replace the search word 'robotics' with whatever else you may be looking for. The Usenet list of news groups and mailing lists is available on hosts that run Usenet News or NetNews servers and/or clients in the newsgroups news.announce.newusers and news.lists. The members of news.newusers.questions, alt.internet.help, alt.internet.access.wanted, and alt.internet.new-users readily accept your help requests. Alt.internet.services focuses on information about services available on the Internet. It is for people with Internet accounts who want to explore beyond their local computers, to take advantage of the wealth of information and services on the net. Services for discussion include: * things you can telnet to (weather, library catalogs, databases, and more), * things you can FTP (like pictures, sounds, programs, data) * clients/servers (like MUDs, IRC, Archie) Every second week, a list of Internet services called the "Special Internet Connections list" is posted to this newsgroup. It includes everything from where to FTP pictures from space, how to find agricultural information, public UNIX, online directories and books, you name it. Dartmouth maintains a merged list of the LISTSERV lists on BITNET and the Interest Group lists on the Internet. Each mailing list is represented by one line. To obtain this list, send a message to LISTSERV@DARTCMS1.BITNET . Enter the following command in the text of the message:

InterNIC Information Service maintains an announcement-only service at LISTSERV@is.internic.net called net-happenings. It distributes announcements about tools, conferences, calls for papers, news items, new mailing lists, electronic newsletters like EDUPAGE, and more. To subscribe, send a message to the LISTSERV containing this command:

subscribe net-happenings Your Name

InterNIC's automated mail service is at MAILSERV@RS.INTERNIC.NET. It allows access to documents and files via email. To use it, send email to the Mailserv with the word "HELP" in the subject field of your mail.

How to get more out of your magazine subscriptions -------------------------------------------------- PC Magazine (U.S.A.) is one of those magazines that arrives here by mail. We butcher them, whenever we find something of interest. The "corpses" are dumped in a high pile on the floor. To retrieve a story in this pile is difficult and time consuming, unless the title is printed on the cover. Luckily, there are shortcuts. Logon to PC MagNet on CompuServe. Type GO PCMAG to get the following menu:

1 Download a PC Magazine Utility 2 PC Magazine Utilities/Tips Forum 3 PC Magazine Editorial Forum 4 PC Magazine Programming Forum 5 PC Magazine After Hours Forum 6 PC Magazine Product Reviews Index 7 Free! - Take a Survey 8 Submissions to PC Magazine 9 Letters to the Editor 10 Subscribe to PC Magazine

Choice six lets you search for stories. Once you have a list with page/issue references, turning the pages gets much easier. PC Magazine is owned by the media giant Ziff-Davis. PC MagNet is a part of ZiffNet on CompuServe. So is Computer Database Plus, which lets you search through more than 250,000 articles from over 200 popular newspapers and magazines. The oldest articles are from early 1987. The database is also available on CD-ROM, but the discs cover only one year at a time. CDP contains full-text from around 50 magazines, like Personal Computing, Electronic News, MacWeek and Electronic Business. Stories from the other magazines are available in abstracted form only. To search the database, CDP, you pay an extra US$24.00 per hour. In addition, you pay US$1.00 per abstract and US$1.50 per full-text article (1992). These fees are added to your normal CompuServe access rates. ZiffNet also offers Magazine Database Plus, a database with stories from over 90 magazines covering science, business, sport, people, personal finance, family, art and handicraft, cooking, education, environment, travel, politics, consumer opinions, and reviews of books and films. The magazines include: Administrative Management, Aging, Changing Times, The Atlantic, Canadian Business, Datamation, Cosmopolitan, Dun's Business Month, The Economist, The Futurist, High Technology Business, Journal of Small Business Management, Management Today, The Nation, The New Republic, Online, Playboy, Inc., Popular Science, Research & Development, Sales & Marketing Management, Scientific American, Technology Review, UN Chronicle, UNESCO Courier and U.S. News & World Report. In the next chapter, we will present another ZiffNet magazine database: the Business Database Plus. Magazine Index (MI), from Information Access Company (U.S.A.), is another source worth looking at. It covers over 500 consumer and general-interest periodicals as diverse as Special Libraries and Sky & Telescope, Motor Trend and Modern Maturity, Reader's Digest and Rolling Stone. Many titles go as far back as 1959. Although most of the database consists of brief citations, MI also contains the complete text of selected stories from a long list of periodicals. It is available through Dialog, CompuServe, BRS, Data-Star, Dow Jones News/Retrieval, Nexis, and others. Say you so often get references to a given magazine that you want a paper subscription. Try the Electronic Newsstand, which is available by gopher or telnet to gopher.netsys.com. If these Internet commands are unavailable, try mail to staff@enews.com.

Finding that book ----------------- Over 270 libraries around the world are accessible by the Internet telnet command. Some of them can also be accessed by Internet mail. This is the case with BIBSYS, a database operated by the Norwegian universities' libraries. I am into transcendental meditation. I'm therefore constantly looking for books on narrow topics like "mantra". To search BIBSYS for titles of interest, I sent mail to genserv@pollux.bibsys.no . The search word was entered in the subject title of the message. By return email, I got the following report:

Date: Fri, 21 Jul 93 13:54:18 NOR From: GENSERV@POLLUX.BIBSYS.NO Subject: Searching BIBSYS

Search request : MANTRA Database-id : BIBSYS Search result : 5 hits.

The following is one of the references. I have forwarded it to my local library for processing:

Forfatter : Gonda, J. Tittel : Mantra interpretation in the Satapatha-Brahmana / by J. Gonda. Trykt : Leiden : E.J. Brill, 1988. Sidetall : X, 285 s. I serie : (Orientalia Rheno-traiectina ; 32) ISBN : 90-04-08776-1 1 - UHF 90ka03324 - UHF/INDO Rh III b Gon

The Danish library database REX may be accessed through most international packet switching networks. Its Network User Address (NUA) is 23824125080000. When connected, enter RC8000 and press return. Press ESC once. The system will respond with ATT. Enter KB REX, and you're ready to search Dansk Bogfortegnelse since 1980, Dansk Musikfortegnelse since 1980, and ISDS Denmark. BARTON is the library system of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its database contains everything received since 1974 except magazine articles, brochures, and technical reports from sources outside M.I.T. Phone: +1-617-258-6700 (1200 bps). Press ENTER a couple of times to access the system. On CompuServe, there is a section for book collectors in the Coin/Stamp/Collectibles Forum, and a Weekly Book Chat section in the ScienceFiction & Fantasy Forum. In the Electronic Mall, you can buy books directly from Ballantine Books, Penguin Books, Small Computer Book Club, The McGraw-Hill Book Company, Time-Life Books and Walden Computer Books. On the Internet, Roswell Computer Books Ltd. (Canada) has an online bookstore with a database of over 7,000 titles (1993). Gopher to nstn.ns.ca, select "Other Gophers in Nova Scotia", and then "Roswell Electronic Computer Bookstore". Failing access to gopher, send your email requests to roswell@fox.nstn.ns.ca . The Book Review Digest (GO BOOKREVIEW) is CompuServe's database of bibliographical references and abstracts of reviews (since 1983). You can search by title, author, and keywords found in the text of book reviews. CompuServe also offers book reviews through Magazine Database Plus. "Books in print" is a North American bibliographic reference database. It is available on BRS and CompuServe. South African Bibliographic and Information Network has a gopher service at info2.sabinet.co.za. FidoNet has COMICS (The Comic Book Echo), BITNET the list Rare Book and Special Collections Catalogers (NOTRBCAT@INDYCMS). NewsNet has the COMPUTER BOOK REVIEW newsletter and on The Well you'll find the "Computer Books" conference. OCLC's WorldCat is a reference database covering books and materials in libraries worldwide. Bookworms may appreciate the BITNET discussion list DOROTHYL (LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU), and especially if they like Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey and Dorothy L. Sayers. On Usenet, you will find alt.books.reviews, k12.library, alt.books.technical, rec.arts.books, and misc. books.technical, and more. On the Internet, there are a rapidly growing number of library online public-access catalogs (OPACs) from all over the world. Some provide users with access to additional resources, such as periodical indexes of specialized databases. More than 270 library catalogs are now online (1992). An up-to-date directory of libraries that are interactively accessible through Internet can be had by anonymous ftp from ftp.unt.edu (then: cd library). File name: LIBRARIES.TXT. Check out the end of Chapter 12 for how to get the file by email (ftpmail). You will also find full electronic versions of books. This book is one example. Many texts are courtesy of Project Gutenberg, an organization whose goal is to develop a library of 10,000 public domain electronic texts by the year 2000. Since books are often quite large, they are somewhat bulky for email transfer. If you have direct Internet access, use anonymous ftp instead. Many books are available through the /pub/almanac/etext directory at oes.orst.edu. For more about how to use the Almanac information server, send Almanac@oes.orst.edu the following email command:

For a list of books, add the line

send gutenberg catalog

Among the offerings, you'll find The Complete Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, The Unabridged Works of Shakespeare, Aesop's Fables, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Holy Bible, The Love Teachings of Kama Sutra, The Holy Koran, The Oedipus Trilogy (Sophocles), Peter Pan, Roget's Thesaurus (1911), and The World Fact Book (1990 - CIA). If quite impossible to locate a given book, try the Rare Books and Special Collections Forum at EXLIBRIS@RUTVM1.BITNET. Non-Chinese speaking people will probably classify Chinese poems as 'rare'. Many of them are impossible to read, unless your computer can handle the special characters, and you know their meaning. Still interested? If yes, subscribe to CHPOEM-L@UBVM.BITNET . Be prepared to use your Big5 and GuoBiao utilities.

Chapter 11: Getting an edge over your competitor ================================================

We must be willing to risk change to keep apace with rapid change.

The key is moderation and balance, supported by sufficient information to allow meaningful feedback.

It requires adaption by management and staff in developing the necessary skills and vision.

This chapter starts with how to use the networks to manage projects. Next, it treats how to monitor competitors, prospects, suppliers, markets, technologies, and trends. It winds down with marketing and sales by modem.

Project coordination -------------------- So far we have mainly been looking at sources of information. Let us start this chapter with some words about 'online conference rooms' for project coordination. Several services offer rental of private conference areas to businesses. Corporations have discovered them to be an efficient way of coordinating a group of people, who are far apart from each other geographically. They are also useful when team members are constantly on the move and hard to gather face to face. Many international companies use such services regularly. The applications are different. They range from tight coordination with suppliers and subcontractors, to development of company strategies and new organizational structures. Renting an online conference room has advantages over doing it in-house. The company does not have to buy software, hardware, expensive equipment for communications, and hire people for to run and maintain a conferencing system. The more international the business, the better. For ideas about how to set up and operate a coordination conference. Study how volunteer organizations do it. One place to check out is KIDPLAN, one of several coordination conferences used by KIDLINK (see Chapter 2 and 5). KIDPLAN is usually most active during April and May each year. This is when their annual projects are being closed down, and new projects are started. Read the dialog between coordinators to get an idea of how the medium is being used. Old conference messages are stored in notebook files. You can therefore have the full coordination dialogs sent you by email. Send all requests for notebook files to

LISTSERV@VM1.NODAK.EDU

Getting notebook files is a two-step process. In your first message to the LISTSERV, ask for a list of available files. Do this by using the following command in your email:

The LISTSERV will return a list of files. The following part is of particular interest:

101/2/ KIDPLAN LOG9105B ALL OWN V 80 2397 91/05/14 23:40:22 Started on Wed, 8 May 91 00:11:09 CDT 102/2/ KIDPLAN LOG9105C ALL OWN V 80 3141 91/05/21 20:44:16 Started on Wed, 15 May 91 01:24:51 CDT 104/2/ KIDPLAN LOG9105D ALL OWN V 80 2685 91/05/28 22:34:31 Started on Wed, 22 May 91 17:01:21 +0200

Don't bother about the details. You just want file names, and dates. The file LOG9105B contains all messages from 8 May 1991 until 15 May. If you want all these three files, send another message to LISTSERV with the following lines:

GET KIDPLAN LOG9105B GET KIDPLAN LOG9105C GET KIDPLAN LOG9105D

The files will be forwarded to your mailbox. Note: Some mailbox services have restrictions on the size of incoming mail. This may prevent you from receiving large notebook files. If this happens, contact your local postmaster for help. Some email systems are unable to forward your return-address correctly to LISTSERV. If you suspect that this is the reason for lack of success, try the following commands:

GIVE KIDPLAN LOG9105B TO Your-Correct-Return-Address GIVE KIDPLAN LOG9105C TO Your-Correct-Return-Address GIVE KIDPLAN LOG9105D TO Your-Correct-Return-Address

Making it work -------------- Making online conferences and task force meetings work, can be a challenge. Most of the dialog is based on the written word. The flow of information can be substantial thus causing an information overload for some participants. To overcome this, many companies appoint moderator-organizers for their online conferences. This person:

Adds value by setting agendas; summarizing points; getting the discussion(s) back on track; moving on to the next point; mediating debate; maintaining address and member lists; acting as general sparkplug/motivator to keep things flowing by making sure that contributions are acknowledged, relevant points are noted, new members are welcomed, silent "Read-Only Members" are encouraged to participate, and the general atmosphere is kept appropriate to the goals of the conference/task force meeting.

Great online conferences don't just happen. Hard work is required. A few people must be responsible for getting the meetings fired up and keep the discussion rolling. The meeting's organization may depend on the number of participants, where they come from, the exclusivity of the forum, and the purpose of the "meeting." In large meetings, with free access for outsiders, the best strategy may be to appoint a Moderator-Editor. This person

Filters contributions, gathers new information, summarizes scattered contributions, does background research.

Filtering may be needed in conferences that are open to customers and media. The main purpose, however, is to help participants cope with the absolute flow of information. A conference can have an educational purpose. If so, you may bring in someone who can add value by bringing experience and expertise to the group. You will also need someone to do all the dirty jobs everyone expects to be done - but never notices until they are not done. This person must keep the show running by serving as a benevolent tyrant, sheriff, judge, mediator, general scapegoat, and by playing a role in setting the general policy and atmosphere of the meeting. Now, back to the 'normal' applications of the online resource.