Neat Web Pages: November 1994

The NCSA "What's New" page

The NCSA is the home of Mosaic, possibly the definitive Web browser. It's also home to this, one of the World Wide  Web's most useful resources. This page is full of announcements and descriptions, containing links to the intelligent, the irreverent, and the just-plain-off-the-wall. Regular updates make the What's New Page a superb start for a Net Surf. And  if you remember something that interested you last month, don't worry, previous What's New pages are still available. This URL is definitely one for the top of the hotlist...

Dilbert: the Geek culture comic strip

O'Reilly Press is best known for the Nutshell series of Unix books (shelf decoration for the geek home), but Global Network News, their on-Web service is rapidly catching up. It's here that you'll find Scott Adam's comic strip "Dilbert".  Dilbert is the archetypal geek, a software engineer who spends time in cyberspace - without his trousers - whilst  desperately trying to have a 'Life'. Updated daily, the cartoons are a hilarious slice of net.life. You'll need a graphical  browser to get the best from this one. Another must for the hotlist.

By the way, Dilbert's since moved to become the Dilbert Zone at United Media's web site, but don't worry. This link will  always point to the right site for your daily fix of Dilbert. You can also be as sad as me, and buy yourself Dilbert  merchandising for your office and your body...

Today's question... Is Dogbert a BOFH?

Jaron Lanier's home page

Jaron Lanier invented Virtual Reality, virtually single handed. A bad bout with venture capitalists lost him both his  company and his patents, but now he's back, concentrating on what he feels really matters: art and music. His Web home page is a tour de force of the web-weaver's art: an enormous picture (an image-map) hides a series of buttons that take  you deeper into his world. And for those that don't use a graphical browser, Jaron's provided text links that serve the same purpose. Worth a visit.

As We May Think

Hypertext isn't that new an idea. Ted Nelson explored it in his self-published 70's book Computer Lib / Dream Machines - available in a late '80s upgrade from Microsoft Press - but the first person to come up with the idea was the  politician and thinker Vannevar Bush. His idea was the "Memex" a device that would remember everything done or seen  or read, and then index it. He wrote about it in 1945 for Atlantic Monthly, and a copy of his article "As We May Think" is now on the Web. One for the net.historians.

The WebCrawler

The Web is a tangle of documents, linked by often illogical connections. It's very difficult to find an exact piece of  information, and there's no index. This is where tools like the WebCrawler come in. Give the WebCrawler a few  keywords, and it'll generate a page of links just for you (but remember to save it for future reference, as it'll be gone next  time you visit). Together with the What's New page it'll give you a route into the Web. Put this one on your hotlist.