Subject: Re: ADN Experience and the cognitive puzzle From: docdon@pinn.net (Don Taylor) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 20:23:47 -0500

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At 12:46 PM 4/28/95 -0500, amandell wrote:
>
>I still don't know really why,  but although I have on my NEXT work  
>station the very easy and quick way to switch from e-mail to Omniweb,  
>and use my bookmark to go straight to the web page I am interested  
>in, I use the web only when I have already decided to read something  
>in specific (one of the articles for example) or for doing a research  
>on a topic I am interested in. And this should not be a matter of  
>technophobia since I started to programm (on a IBM 360) when I was a  
>teenager (please be nice and don't calculate the age:-)).
>
>Since I was curious I asked other people that I know receive the same  
>e-mail news and have access to the web (they use Netscape); Their  
>approach was the same. 
>
>Now I ask:
>May it be that e-mail is sometimes more appealing not because it is  
>easier to use but rather because it is easier to "THINK about"? You  
>just don't have to THINK at all about what you NEED or WANT to read  
>(but when you subscribe).

Put very simply I think what people are finding is that we spend more time
in email than the web, and not from a lack of technical capability. I have
some personal experience in this.

I too learned to program when dinosaurs roamed the earth . (Picture some
of those old machines roaming.) I have a pretty large list of web sites to
visit that I haven't called yet, but I tend to keep my email in-box clean. I
guess this type discussion is relevant to online-news, from the perpective
that we're discussing best information delivery vehicles, but if you'd like
to discuss at length the motivation behind it we would get off topic and you
can contact me direct.

I haven't done any research to prove this, but I believe there are different
types of Netizens who have different vehicular preferences for travelling
the Net. And I don't believe the newness of the Web has anything to do with
it. There is a great deal of information being distributed via the Web, much
of which I download to read later. But there is something convenient about
having material delivered to your mailbox. And there is probably something
also more personal. Just like the newspaper, it is delivered "to your door",
even if you're on vacation, and the copy is "yours".

There are different ways to present electronic information and there are
different benefits to each that I'm sure we don't totally understand yet. I
have always thought of it as the best reference publishing model available,
but most readers don't think of the news as reference.

Here's a personal example of what impact using the web vs. email has. I paid
for a subscription to WEBster. Every other week I would get a list of
"headlines". I would quickly send back a request for the detailed articles
of interest. The latest two issues are on the Web as an experiment, and I've
visited it once (Apr 14) but I don't think I've even thought to go back. In
short, at this point I probably wouldn't subscribe, and I'm not sure why.

OTOH, Inet-Marketing which I am active on is converting to a Digest. It's
still email but its not the same as individual articles, and I think for
many of us Digests are inappropriate. (Perhaps the line here is Digests for
lurkers and individual missives for participants.) What effect on letters to
the editor would a newspaper get by distributing singular articles rather
than a digest?

>I still think that the overattention on customization and the active  
>role of the audience may simply not be the right way (better, the  
>only way) to understand our future problems. If information overload  
>makes difficult not only to find  the information, but also to  
>ORGANIZE YOUR PERCEIVED NEEDS of information, it seems that this  
>should be considered in the design of the new electronic publications  
>(both in terms of ORGANIZATION OF THE CONTENT and in terms of  
>ORGANIZATION OF THE DELIVERY)..

I supsect that many feel, as I sometimes do, that "ugly old ASCII" is not
the best way to present an information product. So we want to use the Net's
visual presenter - the Web. HotJava aplications within Netscape like PDF
files for improved layout appeal strongly to me. But perhaps there are some
subtle forces at work on the Net that are extending the concept of "content,
content, content" as the three most significant values you can offer. A for
information overload and perceived needs, those are major topics (favorites
of mine) on their own best left for another time.

Tally Ho

    DocDon

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