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Click OK to receive our occasional Newsletter Print ResourcesIn addition to advertising your business online, it's important not to forget about advertising in the real world. Advertising in the real world does not have to be expensive. There are many specialized publications pertaining to just about every business, occupation, sport and hobby. The advertising rates are substantially lower in these specialty publications even though the circulation is not as large as the major magazines and newspapers. Readers of these smaller publications consist almost exclusively of your target audience. If you plan to use traditional advertising, get a handle on the media resources by checking out Standard Rate and Data Services (SRDS). SRDS publications and directories have been the foundation of every solid media buy for more than 78 years - they are the "meeting place" where buyers and sellers of media converge and millions of dollars are exchanged daily. Their innovative e-kit provides electronic access to media kit information for the leading publishers of business publications, consumer magazines and newspapers. These directories list business, technical, and trade publications categorized by markets served. You will find it very helpful when you are trying to decide where to advertise. A few more resources for traditional advertising include: http://www.tradepub.com/ The premier internet service for professional trade publications. Great for finding and subscribing to quality professional magazines. Magazine Newsstand displaying hundreds of Newsstand magazines and features more than 1,000 magazine publications available to consumers today. You can search for a magazine publication by title or by category. --John Blower
Breach of SecurityThere has been much talk recently over the issue of Internet security, with companies falling over themselves - and each other - to announce the latest, super-secure encryption software. But how prevalent are breaches of security on the Internet? Dr. John Howard of the Computer Emergency Response Team has published his Ph.D. dissertation on trends in Internet security from 1989 to 1995, through analysis of some 4,300 reported incidents. The research accomplished the following: 1) development of a taxonomy for the classification of Internet attacks and incidents, 2) organization, classification, and analysis of incident records available at the CERTŪ/CC, and 3) development of recommendations to improve Internet security, and to gather and distribute information about Internet security. This is engrossing if somewhat dry stuff, but the essence is that security incidents were generally found to be decreasing relative to the size of the Internet. Estimates based on the research indicated that a typical Internet domain was involved in no more than around one incident per year, and a typical Internet host in around one incident every 45 years. Reorts of the death of Internet security seem to have been somewhat exaggerated. You can find the full report at http://www.cert.org/research/JH Thesis/ --John Blower
Bits 'n' PiecesIf you want a lot of good information about writing and distributing press releases on the web, drop by the Internet News Bureau. You'll find a well organized page of links to PR information of all kinds. Most are required reading before you start your first press release. Wonder where you can find a huge list of search engines and directories? Go to the Internet Sleuth and look through the thousands of directories and search engines they have categorized to help you get around. You could easily spend the rest of the weekend at the Sleuth doing submissions. Clickz is a site you should bookmark. NetMechanic has two services, a link checker and an HTML validator. We haven't tried the HTML validator, but if it is as good as their link checker, we'll probably be impressed. BTW - It's all free. With their link checker, you can check the links on one page, or on your whole site. The link checker can be run 'while you wait' or you can submit your job and go about your business and pretty soon you'll get an email telling you where to see your results on an HTML page. A nice side note: the link checker handles frames based pages, unlike a lot of the others. Take a trip over to Gap Mtn Technologies to see a site built around a promotional program instead of around its product. That's all for now, folks... --John Blower
Domain ConfusionThe system of allocating Top Level Domains (TLD's) is rapidly collapsing like a house of cards. Network Solutions is universally reviled as being unresponsive and inefficient, and is being sued by name.space for refusing access to its Domain Names Register. The InterNIC has a rival in the AlterNIC. IAHC (dissolved May 1, 1997 in favor of http://www.gtld-mou.org/) is being condemned for its absurd proposal to introduce another seven TLD's, as well as being assailed as undemocratic, unrepresentative and monopolistic of power. Confusion reigns - and will do so even more when the Network Solutions contact expires next year. And now into the fray steps the Kingdom of Tonga!
(Tonga Tonic Corporation offers the registration (for the now standard fee of 50 USD per year) of Internet domain names in the new .TO top-level domain from its fully automated Web site at http://www.tonic.to. Tonic (without gin, we presume...)? Well, according to the site's FAQ: "Tonic is the Tonga Network Information Center. Since 1995, in conjunction with the Government of Tonga, we have been the national DNS registration authority for the country of Tonga..." The site is quite intriguing. But a bit short on solid information. However, the ".to" suffix seems to work. And will doubtless contribute to more confusion amongst surfers old and new (anyone for "pepsi.to"? it's available...). We. quite simply, don't know. Perhaps the United Nations should take over the whole kit and caboodle. Maybe then a large and powerful Western Nation could be prevailed upon to pay its arrears in subscriptions... --John Blower Caxtonian Thinking...When William Caxton invented printing around seven hundred years ago, he fundamentally changed the way we thought. Narrative, over time, became commonplace. Print was used for telling stories - stories which, hitherto, had remained in the oral tradition and hence subject to the vagaries of the medium of delivery. Print, in its turn, gave rise to other media. Film, for example, prior to DW Griffith, was essentially a static story-telling edium. It reproduced the mannerisms of a stage play. TV - and ultimately video - essentially performed the same functions. That is, telling a story in a linear format (with some notable, experimental exceptions). Now we have the Web. And we're still trying to tell stories. And it doesn't work. In this column, we exhort our readers to constantly update and change the content and look of their sites. After all, "content is king". Content undoubtedly IS king. But what kind of content? We doubt that it is the "narrative-style' content that we currently produce. It largely doesn't work. And yet we continue to produce it. Why? The simple answer is that we do not, as yet, understand what is appropriate for the New Medium. What we are beginning to understand is that it ain't print. Because reading from a screen is, quite simply, inefficient. Very often, we simply look at what works in a print medium and import it wholesale to the Web. Typically, a large corporation will put together a journalist, a graphic designer and a programmer and tell them to produce a site. They are asked to behave as one mind. Creativity, unfortunately, doesn't work like that. It is invariably a solitary, lonely endeavor. As yet, no one individual has emerged with a complete grasp of the appropriate mechanism for unleashing the power of the New Medium. "Push" may be part of the answer. But we're a long way from truly understanding and using to best advantage the medium's power. --John Blower
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