Bureaucrats with 'Tude
The IRS tries to lighten up. It's a bit of a strain.
97.10.16
Revolution 2.0
Esther Dyson wants to redesign the digital world -- or at least get the brainstorming started.
97.10.08
News You Can't Use
The art of the parody is alive and well.
97.10.01
A Prairie Home-Page Companion
Don't know what socks to wear? Ask Garrison Keillor.
97.09.24
The Witch's Voice
Coming out of the broom closet.
97.09.17
Chess on the Net
An online community where those with the best moves always mate.
For more, see the complete Web Citations Index.
"The Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox,"
Vannevar Bush wrote in 1945, in his now-famous Atlantic article, "As We
May Think." Bush's vision essentially became reality in the 1990s, when the
editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica (EB) rolled out a CD-ROM version of
their product and made the EB available (for a price) on the Internet. With the
recent launch of Encyclopedia
Britannica's Internet Guide the EB editors are now living up to
another of Bush's predictions: "There will be a new profession of trail
blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails
through the enormous mass of the common record."The twenty-five editors of the EB guide have selected 65,000 sites according to criteria that include depth, utility of information, credentials of authors and publishers, ease of navigation, and frequency of revision. Each site is placed into one of fourteen categories, all of which are then divided into sub-categories that are organized in an extended outline. The result is an index that is more detailed in terms of categorization than anything
Yahoo!, Lycos, Infoseek, Magellan, or Excite has to offer. The EB editors' descriptions of the sites they have chosen -- especially those that have been given "Recommended," "Exceptional," or "Best of the Web" status -- also tend to be more in-depth than those found on other Web guides. One feels a certain
confidence when browsing the EB guide; the distinct emphasis on the selection of quality sites is a breath of fresh air at a time when Web directories often produce an abundance of irrelevant pages and broken links.Imposing a sense of order on the chaotically increasing content of the Internet is a daunting (and perhaps quixotic) goal. The fact that the Encyclopedia Britannica sees a future in taking on such a formidable challenge must be heartening for a great many people, especially those who are new to the Web. Others may object that the very zeitgeist of the Net resists such efforts, instead encouraging people to make their own judgments without the "help" of pedigreed experts. Luckily, the Internet is large. There's room for both views.
Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
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