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Hi everyone, Below are some notes which you may have seen recently (?). If not, I thought they would be of interest. This is the sea of ideas and developments that CCN floats in ! In the first note, it's interesting to see how Stats Cdn rationalizes access issues to the Internet in Canada, although true, it's much more complex than their simple assessment of the problem. In the second note about ISPs and access issues in Europe, it's interesting to note that 'Freeserves are concentrating on trying to build a fully enabled portal sites.' In terms of CCN's longterm sustainability, this may well be a growing area for us to address (besides the obvious attention to member support services), namely providing a high quality portal that provides extensive community-based information on the HRM area, the province and the country ? This could dove-tail nicely with our anniversary project to invite member input into ideas on revamping our homepage, etc. (?) There are very little reference sources to Canadian web sites on the net and when you have such people as Bell thinking of merging their Sympatico services with AOL, Canadian sources and more specifically, 'public space in cyberspace,' and 'personal service/support' will become increasingly secondary to North American corporate agendas. Community-nets are practically the only alternative to this corporate merger mania and the flattening of cultures and values within cyberspace. Lastly, the note on online newspaper publishing, it's interesting to note that 'local news is the most popular content at online newspaper sites.' This confirms a bit further the notion of specific portals which define areas of information that is geographically based (news, entertainment, life styles, health, social concerns, issues, religion/spirituality, online shopping, libraries, etc.). At the moment, in our area it's fairly scattered with no lead sources here in HRM other than the established media outlets (which are also not the most sophisticated nor informative), plus of course, the library network which is great, but not everyone thinks of it yet as a main online source for their information needs (atleast not yet !). It has been observed in the Internet services field, that within three years, 40% of what we do now will be done differently ! In some facets it maybe as high as 60%. Thus, besides maintaining our current support services, our task in serving our membership and attracting new members is to keep an eye on where we want to be in three years time as a community net, and how that might also change what we do and how we do it. These are just reflections which I hope to run by you all on an occasional basis. Please feel free to let me know your own reflections on where you think CCN should continue to position itself in all of these developments as we work towards providing the best Community net service in Canada and North America ! Cheers, Leo ----- Internet use in Canada climbing (Canada) WebPosted Thu Jul 15 16:54:17 1999 http://newsworld.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/go.pl?1999/07/15/internet990715 OTTAWA - More and more Canadian households are making use of the Internet. There were 4.3 million households using the Internet last year. The figure is up almost 25 per cent over 1997. People with high incomes are five times more likely to be using the 'Net than those earning low incomes. Statistics Canada says that's likely because lower-income earners are less inclined to be employed in jobs that require the use of computers. The rates of connectedness appears to be rising for all age groups. Households of single families with unmarried children under the age of 18 are more likely than other households to use the Internet. Older groups remain relatively less connected, with about 7.2 per cent of households headed by someone aged 65 and over online. Links: http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/990715/d990715a.htm -------------- Reuters: Total Free Net Access in Europe? While Jupiter analysts believe that free Net access in Europe is imminent, the major European ISPs are not convinced that advertising and ecommerce can cover the cost of telephone calls. AOL Europe and T-Online, two of the biggest providers in Europe, are particularly hesitant about providing total free-to-air access in Europe. AOL believe that total free access will attract a divergent demographic which may not be attractive to advertisers. They believe that subscriber names, credit card numbers and basic personal information is what will attract advertisers and subsequently drive revenue to their site. ISPs are trying out several different revenue models mostly inspired by the particular company's core business.Dell Computers have just launched a free service which they hope will help sell more PCs. Tesco Plc hope to drive traffic to their retail Web site. Freeserve are concentrating on trying to build a fully enabled portal site. Telefonica SA, the largest Spanish phone company set up an ISP in the hopes of boosting traffic on their telephone network. Some analysts are predicting that given the number of ISPs competing for the same market, it's only a matter of time before one of them offers an entirely free service. One provider X-Stream Technologies is already doing that. On certain weekends they send out emails to their subscriber base informing them of free number to dial up for Internet access. <http://www.techserver.com/noframes/story/0,2294,67602-107001-757452-0,0 0.html> ------ PUBLISHING: Archives: <http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=FS&cat_id=46> ******************************************************************** Editor & Publisher:Local News Pivotal for Online Newspapers A new study from Editor & Publisher has found that while local news is the most popular content at online newspaper sites, readers are often disappointed with the product. On average, users rated the quality of online local news at just 4.5 points out of 10. As can be expected, local news was ranked higher by readers of smaller newspapers. The study found that 83 percent of users of newspapers with a circulation of less than 250,000 are most interested in local news stories. This compares to 58 percent of users of papers with a circulation of over 250,000. In addition, the study found that over 50 percent of users prefer to access national and international news from major news sites rather than from their local newspaper site. One third of users that access news at higher circulation newspaper Web sites say they have reduced their consumption of off-line newspapers, compared to 25 percent of users that access smaller circulation papers. This may be due to the fact that bigger newspapers make more content available online, according to the report. However, the Web public has been less likely to reduce its consumption of newspapers than other media since going online. The study found that greatest decrease has been in the consumption of videos, cited by 35 percent of respondents, followed by telephone usage, 30 percent, TV, 29 percent, radio, 25 percent, compared to newspapers, 18 percent. Overall, email remains the first port of call of 91 percent of Internet users, with 82 percent going online to read the Web edition of newspapers. In terms of content, the most popular content is local news, accessed by 72 percent of users, followed by weather news, 40 percent, national news, 39 percent, and classified ads, 38 percent. The report cautions that in general, newspaper publishers need to balance the print and online edition of the paper, and to conduct more and regular audience research. E&P estimate that just one fifth of online newspapers currently conduct audience research and that they need to use the demographic information on their users more effectively. The findings are based on an online survey of 53,000 readers of 75 online newspapers across the US. It was conducted between February and June, 1999. A prize of a laptop computer was offered to respondents to the survey. <http://www.mediainfo.com/ephome/news/newshtm/stories/063099n3.htm> _________________________________ Leo J. Deveau Wolfville, N.S. Canada _________________________________ "I think unbridled capitalism is an enemy, and I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people." -Author, John le Carre´.
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