Just about everyone knows what the Internet is: the global network of computers which transmits information and communication at the speed of light or sometimes more slowly. And just about everyone knows how the Internet got started. It began as a Cold War scheme for protecting American defense computers from nuclear attacks, so that if one machine was taken out by a bomb, the ones that were left could still let users communicate.
Somewhere between the government's ARPANET and today, the National Science Foundation and a handful of colleges and universities made the Internet the chaotic interconnection of computers that we know and love. And since those schools pay for that connection with tuition money and grants, many of them proscribe the use of their Internet resources for commercial purposes.
Therein lies the quandary for many businesses. The Internet could be a great market opportunity; excepting the students who have only temporary access while at school, the people using the Net include scientists, programmers, and others who are likely to be intelligent, high-skilled, and well-employed. But if businesses can't advertise or win customers on the Internet, then how can they reach this perfect market?
Usenet newsgroups, at first, seem the perfect place. Usenet is a global collection of forums in which people can discuss and debate their favorite topics. People read newsgroup articles, then e-mail a private response to the originator or "post" their own messages -- much like a bulletin board full of bits of paper and thumbtacks. The posts have to travel through many different machines, sometimes as many as ten, before they finish going around the world. These machines, called gateways, are very often located at universities and other research or government facilities.
Hence the difficulty for businesses who want to advertise in Usenet newsgroups. The facilities that propagate messages through newsgroups lose real money when any message is posted. While advertising may seem free to the advertiser, someone, somewhere, is paying for electricity, disk space, or man-hours to send the message.
So where's a business to go, if posting ads to newsgroups is like renting a hotel room and making long-distance calls, collect, to potential customers? Well, there's a subset of the Internet that is gaining popularity for researchers, students, and commercial ventures alike -- the World-Wide Web.
The Web is easy to navigate: all you need is a client program, or browser, a SLIP or PPP account with a local service provider, and a fast modem. If you're not sure how to do that, talk to the administrators of your system, ask in a local newsgroup, or read the newsgroups alt.winsock, comp.os.ms-windows.apps.comm, comp.os.ms-windows.networking.tcp-ip, or comp.infosystems.www.announce (find the FAQ's before posting!). If you don't already have access to the Internet, then you can't browse the Web!
Why is the Web so great? Why is advertising allowed? Here are just a few reasons:
1. It's easy for both users and information providers. Graphical browsers give you a simple point-and-click interface which lets you click on a phrase or image to jump to another "page" on machines all over the world. For the people who put the pages on the Web, it's almost no work at all to format a file for the browser to understand.
2. Providers pay to give you the information. That's right. Instead of shoving a mess of advertisements through newsgroups, they have to pay someone for space on a machine to store their information. They also have to pay programmers to format the information, connect the company to the Internet properly, and maintain the services.
3. It's completely voluntary. It's up to a user to choose to look at a page or not. The files do not arrive, unsolicited, into a newsgroup or into a user's mailbox -- someone has to choose to click on a link or type in the URL (the file location "address") to go to a page.
4. Companies can get information about the people who look at their pages. Putting a fill-in form on a set of Web pages is trivial. Users simply fill it out or select choices, then click a "submit" button. Another option is to use a statistics-gathering program, which can find out exactly how many times a page was accessed from what Internet address. If a company sees that a lot of people from addresses ending in "edu" are accessing the pages, then they can tweak their pages to cater more to students or professors.
5. The number of people on the Internet is growing. Exponentially. Providers can reach thousands of people per day for less than the cost of a major marketing study and mass mailing.
Thousands of companies put up new Web services every month. So is Medio on the Web? You bet! Open your Web browser and go to Medio's Web pages right away:
Copyright 1995 by M. L. Grant
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