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Index of Subjects Hi George, Thanks for your comments. My notes are interspersed: At 10:18 AM 10/12/98 -0300, George White wrote: >Most people don't understand WWW and rely too much on advertising. As a >result, they think they have to have IE or Netscape. It is hard for CCN >and lynx to attract attention. Advertising is, however, targetted at >people with disposable income. CCN needs to target groups that have to be >careful with their money. One problem is that many small organizations >get technical "advice" from members who _are_ targetted by advertisers and >don't realize that CCN would give a small org. more bang for their buck. Agreed. Difficult to overcome. One approach is to get the "technical advisors" on our side. I think this served us well in the past, but has not served us well recently as the "technical advisors" have moved on to more "technically sophisticated" systems. Some of CCN's most senior tech people, who might once only have had a ccn email address now use mpowered and support ccn cause it is a worthwhile cause. At one point, we were the obvious solution, not just a worthwhile cause. >> I think it is a) lack of PPP access for individuals and lack of PPP/FTP >> access for IP's and c) lack of network services (multiple email, etc) >> accounts for organizations. > >As a heavy user of the WWW I find that lynx and pine are my preferred >tools: a) they are available on a variety of platforms, b) they have low This is absolutely true ... for existing members of CCN. However, Joe and Jane Sackville, new to the Internet and computers take one look at the "Chebucto" terminal at the library and the machine running Netscape and ... make a bee line for the machine for the graphical interface. This may not be logical but it is what happens. Since offering the graphical dial-up access is easier than trying to intercept and reeducate Joe and Jane mid-flight path, I'll go with a graphical access. >resource demands so I can run other tasks at the same time. There are >really very few sites for which a graphical interface adds value, but >too many that don't support lynx. Using lynx first at least lets me >see what problems someone who does not have alternatives might face, and >I can complain to the site admin. My assumption is that our starting point in any of these discussions is to provide access that is text-friendly first and foremost. That does not, however, preclude offering graphical interfaces to members with graphical capabilities. An observation: 98% of the people using the Internet use either Netscape or IE. 90% of the personal computers operating today are running windows.
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