Newspaper of the future
Years ago, Nicholas Negroponte of Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
said that today's newspapers are old-fashioned and soon to be replaced by
electronic "ultra personal" newspapers.
 "If the purpose is to sell
news," he said, then it must be completely wrong to sell newspapers. Personally,
I think it is a dreadful way of receiving the news."
MIT's Media Laboratory developed
an electronic newspaper that delivered daily personalized news to each
researcher. The newspaper was "written" by a computer that searched through
news services' wires and other news sources according to each person's interest
profile.
The system could present the
stories on paper or on screen. It could convert them to speech, so the "reader"
could listen to the news in the car or the shower.
In a tailor-made electronic
newspaper, personal news makes big headlines. If you are off for San Francisco
tomorrow, the weather forecasts for this city makes the front page. Email
from your son will also get there.
"What counts in my newspaper
is what I personally consider newsworthy," said Negroponte.
He claimed the personal newspaper
is a way of getting a grip on the information explosion. "We cannot do it
the old way anymore. We need other agents that can do prereading for us.
In this case, the computer happens to be our agent."
Testing the concept
The first test version of The de Presno Daily News appeared in 1987. It did
not convert news to sound. It did not appear like a newspaper page on my
notebook's screen. Not because it was impossible at the time. I just did
not feel the 'extras' were worth the effort.
My personal interest profile
was taken care of by scripts. If I wanted news, the "news processor" went
to work and "printed" a new edition. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays,
I got an "extended edition."
This is a section from the
first historical issue:
"Front page," Thursday, November 21, 1987
Under the headline "News From Tokyo," items like these:
TOSHIBA TO MARKET INEXPENSIVE PORTABLE WORD PROCESSOR
TOHOKU UNIVERSITY CONSTRUCTING SEMICONDUCTOR RESEARCH LAB
TOSHIBA TO SUPPLY OFFICE EQUIPMENT TO OLIVETTI
NISSAN DEVELOPS PAINT INSPECTION ROBOT
MADE-TO-ORDER POCKET COMPUTER FROM CASIO
The articles were captured from Kyoto News Service through Down Jones/News
Retrieval.
The column with news from
the United States had stories from NEWSBYTES' newsletters. Hot News From
England came from several sources, including The
Financial Times and
Reuters. Headlines read:
-
THE CHRISTMAS SELLING WAR
-
BIG MACS GOING CHEAP TO UNIVERSITY STUDENTS
"Page 2" was dedicated to technology intelligence. "Page 3" had stories
about telecommunications, mainly from Brainwave for
NewsNet's newsletters. "Page 4" covered personal
computer applications.
Several years later
The technology is here. We have services "pushing" filtered news to our desktops.
We can subscribe to filtered news in many other ways. Anyone can design personal
"newspapers" using powerful communication programs with extensive script
features.
My personal "newspaper" now
works as follows:
-
Daily, article menus are automatically retrieved from NewsLinx
(Chapter 9),
Individual.com, and two similar Norwegian
services. Retrieval is done by a system build on use of the Agora Web by
email services (Chapter 12).
-
Upon receipt, my tailormade news system analyzes the menus, and suggests
stories to read based on words or phrases found in the titles. Enter to read,
'n' to skip. Desired articles are automatically prepared for retrieval by
Agora mail. Later that day, the articles arrive in my mailbox, and I can
read them when I get time. Adding or deleting terms to search for in the
menus is easy, and takes seconds.
-
My system also analyzes my incoming electronic mail for interesting contents,
including those coming from selected clipping systems
(Chapter 11). Interesting finds are highlighted on
screen, on my newspaper's front page if you like.
News meta services, like NewsLink, individual, Riksagenten, and Nettvik,
are here to stay. Then there is push. Expect more alternatives.
Having news delivered to your
mailbox or screen is the easy part of the equation. Selecting and reading
is the difficult part. Most people do not have time to read the most
interesting articles published each day. I do not even have time for the
daily selection menus. Without automation, I'd be lost.
Enabling Internet users to
select articles automatically may well be the next important battle field.
Some complain it is too difficult
to read news on a computer screen. Maybe so, but pay attention to what is
happening in notebook computers. This paragraph was written on a small PC
by the fireplace in my living room. The computer is not much larger or heavier
than a book.
(Sources for monitoring notebook
trends: Newsbytes' IBM and Apple reports,
Ziff Davis' ZD Net).
An update of MIT Media Lab's
thinking on "News in the Future" can be found at
http://nif.www.media.mit.edu/.
Electronic news by radio
Radio technology is being
used to deliver Usenet newsgroup to bulletin boards (example: PageSat Inc.
in the US). Also, consider this:
Businesses need a constant
flow of news to remain competitive.
NewsEdge markets a real-time
news service called NewsEdge Live. They call it "live news processing." It
continuously collects news from hundreds of news wires, including sources
like PR Newswire, Knight-Ridder/Tribune
Business News, Dow Jones News Service, Dow Jones Professional Investor Report,
Reuters Financial News.
The stories are "packaged"
and immediately feed to customers' personal computers, workstations and intranets
by FM, satellite, X.25 broadcast, or the Internet:
-
All news stories are integrated in a live news stream all day long,
-
The software manages the simultaneous receipt of news from multiple services,
and alerts users to stories that match their individual interest profiles.
It also maintains a full-text database of the most recent 250,000 stories
on the user's server for quick searching.
Packet radio
Global amateur radio networks allow users to modem around the world, and
even in outer space. Its users never get a telephone bill. They are specifically
designed for email, and cannot be used to access interactive Internet services.
There are hundreds of packet
radio based bulletin boards (PBBS). They are interconnected by short wave
radio, VHF, UHF, and satellite links. See
http://www.wallycom.com/~wally/packet.html
for information. Technology aside, they look and feel just like standard
bulletin boards, and some of them also support TCP/IP, and have web pages.
Once you have the equipment,
can afford the electricity to power it up, and the time it takes to get a
radio amateur license, communication itself is free. Typically, you'll need
a radio (VHR tranceiver), antenna, cable for connecting the antenna to the
radio, and a controller (TNC - Terminal Node Controller).
Most PBBS systems are connected
to a network of packet radio based boards. Some amateurs use 1200 bps, but
speeds of up to 56,000 bps are being used on higher frequencies.
Hams are working on real-time
digitized voice communications, still-frame (and even moving) graphics, and
live multiplayer games. In some countries, there are gateways available to
terrestrial public and commercial networks, such as Internet, and Usenet.
Packet radio is proved as a possible technology for wireless extension of
the Internet.
Radio and satellites are being
used to help countries in the Third World. Volunteers in Technical
Assistance (VITA), a private, nonprofit organization, is one of those
concerned with technology transfers in humanitarian aid to these countries.
VITA's portable packet radio
system was used for global email after a volcanic eruption in the Philippines
in 1991. Today, the emphasis is on Africa.
VITA's "space mailbox" passes
over each single point of the earth twice every 25 hours at an altitude of
800 kilometers. When the satellite is over a ground station, the station
sends files and messages for storage in the satellite's computer memory and
receives incoming mail. The cost of ground station operation is based on
solar energy batteries, and therefore relatively cheap.
To learn more about Vita's
projects, subscribe to their mailing list by email to
listserv@auvm.american.edu.
Use the command Sub DEVEL-L <First- name Last-name>.
The American Radio Relay League
(AARL) operates an Internet information service called the ARRL Information
Server. For information, send email to
info@arrl.org with the word HELP in the
the text.
The WWW server for Amateur
Radio will give you easy access to the Frequently Asked Questions
and more. There's another one at
http://buarc.bradley.edu/.
Cable TV
Cable TV networks increasingly offer gateways into the Internet and other
online services. One possible next step is for the cable TV networks to be
interconnected not unlike the Internet itself. We'll see.
Example: Continental Cablevision
Inc. (U.S.A.) lets customers plug PCs and a special modem directly into its
cable lines to link up with the Internet. The cable link bypasses local phone
hookups and provides the capability to download whole books and other information
at speeds up to 10 million bits per second.
See
http://www.teleport.com/~samc/cable1.html
for more about Cable TV communications, try
The next generation dial-up modem
New technologies with names like ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line),
VDSL (Very High Digital Subscriber Line), and HDSL, have quietly been sneaking
up from behind. These modems can transmit data at speeds from 176 kbits/s
to 52 Mbits/s, depending on line length.
ASDL modems are connected
to ordinary copper phone lines (2-wired), and will typically enable users
to receive information at 6 mbits/s and up depending on the distance from
the telephone exchange. Usually, they can only send at 176 to 640 kbits/s.
This is enough for many applications, including video on demand.
See
http://www.adsl.com/ for background
information, and supplement with a quick search using Alta Vista in
Chapter 10.
Satellite communications
Hughes Network Systems (USA) markets
DirecPC, a small satellite dish
that picks up digital signals from the air on personal computers. Users can
get news, sports, and stock information as part of a "basic access" content
package. The basic service also includes a "Turbo Internet" application so
subscribers can receive megabytes of Internet documents at high speeds of
up to 24 Mbps.
Globalstar is a wholesale
provider of mobile and fixed satellite-based telephony services for voice
calls, Short Messaging Service (SMS), roaming, positioning, fax, and data
communications via 48 low-earth-orbiting (LEO) satellites. As a wholesaler,
Globalstar sells access to its system to regional and local telecom service
providers around the world. It is due to start operations in the year 2000.
Teledesic Corp. plans a network
of 840 low- earth-orbit (LEO) satellites covering 95 percent of the earth's
surface by the year 2002. The idea is that we will have access to information
from almost anywhere. With a small bit of hardware, Teledesic will let you
communicate at 16 Kbps duplex anywhere on the globe. With slightly bigger
equipment, up to 2 Mbps.
Bill Gates has invested heavily in Teledesic, so there might eventually
be a Microsoft involvement.
A consortium lead by Sky
Station (USA) plans an international transmission system of balloons
just 21 km over earth. In the year 2000, they will offer wireless, 1.5Mbps
T1 links directly to computers. The transmissions can also be used for portable
videophone and Web TV applications, according to the company.
Satellite program producer
Japan Image Communications Co. plans to start satellite broadcasts for home
computers during 1997. Offerings will include economic news and game software
on the Internet, using the JCSAT-3 communications satellite.
Other interesting satellite
projects on the horizon include Skybridge (Alcatel Espace, France), CyberStar
(Loral Space & Communications, USA), Lockheed Martin's Astrolink,
AT&T's Voicestar, and Motorola's Celestri and M-Star.
The
biz.pagesat newsgroup on Usenet
is "For discussion of the Pagesat Satellite Usenet Newsfeed."
Electronic mail on the move
For years, national telephone companies, backed by ITU-TSS, Lotus, Novell,
Microsoft and other software companies,
pushed the X.400 email standard, while commercial online services like
CompuServe, Dialcom, MCI Mail,
GEIS, and Sprint promoted their own proprietary
solutions.
Nobody really cared much about
the Internet, until it suddenly was there for everybody. It has changed the
global email scene completely.
In 1992, the president of
the Internet Society made the following
prediction:
".. by the year 2000 the Internet will consist of some 100 million hosts,
3 million networks, and 1 billion users (close to the current population
of the People's Republic of China). Much of this growth will certainly come
from commercial traffic."
If this comes true, then proprietary email systems (like those built on X.400)
will fade away and even possibly disappear.
Watch
the Internet Mail Consortium. Their
focus is on "cooperatively managing and promoting the rapidly-expanding world
of electronic mail on the Internet." Also, watch the proliferation of
free email for everybody on the Internet.
The commercials go Internet
Daily, new databases and information services appear on the Internet. Most
are free. World Wide Web, hypertext, and distributed text-searching systems
(like WAIS) make it easier than ever to find information.
While this puts pressure on
the old commercial services, it also creates new opportunities. Many have
already opened shop on the Internet. Others focus on making it easier for
users to connect directly from this global matrix of networks. Eventually,
we may well find everybody there.
Telebase Systems resells
Dialog and other professional and business database
information to individual consumers through services like
IQuest.
Their offering is a top-level
subject-oriented menu system. Subscribers can use it interactively at
http://www.telebase.com/. Pricing
depends on the database being searched. It offers databases with primarily
business information from well known sources, such as Standard & Poor's,
Dun & Bradstreet, TRW Business Credit, magazines, newspapers, etc.
Dun & Bradstreet is at
the Web address http://www.dnb.com/. You
will find Elsevier Science, the scientific communications branch of Reed
Elsevier, at http://www.elsevier.nl/.
Cheaper and better communications
During Christmas 1987, a guru said that once the 9600 bps V.32 modems fell
below the US$1,200 level, they would create a new standard. Today, such modems
can be bought at prices lower than US$100. In several countries, 56 Kbs modems
are emerging as the preferred choice in competition with even faster ISDN
and cable modems.
Expect developments within
data compression to have a further impact on the costs of global communications.
Wild dreams get real
ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Networks) already lets many users do several
things simultaneously on the same telephone line. They can write and talk
while using the same line for transfers of pictures, music, video, fax, voice
and data.
However, ISDN is just an
intermediate step towards much faster speeds for everybody: Ordinary phone
modems at 56 Kbps; 2 Mbps communication by satellite; 2 Mbps by cable modem;
up to 52 Mbps communication by ADSL. Increased transmission speeds are opening
up for "a new world" of opportunities. Some of them are here already.
Here are some key words about
what increased speeds may give us:
-
Teleconference with your mom on Mother's Day or send video email.
-
Chats, with the option of having pictures of the people we are talking to
up on our local screen (for example in a window, each time he or she is saying
something). Eventually, we may get the pictures in 3-D.
-
microWonders Inc. (Toronto, Canada) promotes Internet Global Phone (IGP),
free software that provides two-way voice communications over Internet
connections. The program will run on any PC equipped with a SoundBlaster
compatible sound card, speakers, and a microphone. The compression technology
(GSM) makes real-time voice connections practical over any common modem-based
Internet connection from 14.400 bits/s up.
-
Fujitsu Cultural Technologies and CompuServe
Information Service offer WorldsAway, a graphical 3-D chat environment where
animated "avatars" interact in a virtual cocktail party. Each participant
can control his or her avatar, making it walk across the room, sit down,
etc., Conversation is depicted cartoon-style in a balloon over the avatar's
head. Characters can move, examine, exchange and sell objects online using
tokens, and can even invite other characters to their own private residences
for some one-on-one chat time.
-
Database searches in text and pictures, with displays of both.
-
Electronic transfers of video/movies over a standard telephone line.
-
The "Internet Talk
Radio" have delivered radio programs over the net for a long time.
-
Paramount Pictures has a Web site dedicated to the motion picture
Star Trek Generations. It offers a
galaxy of unique Star Trek elements for retrieval, including pictures, sounds
and a preview of the movie, in addition to behind-the-scenes information.
-
Online amusement parks with group plays, creative offerings (drawing, painting,
building of 3-D electronic sculptures), shopping (with "live" people presenting
merchandise and good pictures of the offerings, test drives, etc.), casino
(with real prizes), theater with live performance, online "dressing rooms"
(submit a 2-D picture of yourself, and play with your looks), online car
driving schools (drive a car through Tokyo or New York, or go on safari).
-
WorldPlay Entertainment has
played around with these ideas for quite some time.
-
Your favorite books, old as new, available for on-screen reading or searching
in full text. Remember, many libraries have no room to store all the new
books that they receive. Also, wear and tear tend to destroy paper based
books over time.
-
Many books are already available online, including this one.
-
Instant access to hundreds of thousands of 'data cottages'. These are computers
in private homes of people around the world set up for remote access. Technical
advances in the art of transferring pictures will turn some cottages into
tiny online "television stations."
-
Before you know it, scientists will be able to collaborate with near TV-quality
video and sound connections.
-
Find information about and navigate cities using three-dimensional models
(VRML) that are exact mirror-like copies of their originals. Meet and interact
with citizens at virtual meeting points. View public areas in real-time.
Access cultural services online. Make purchases in shops. Conduct business
with officials. Use toll or advertising-financed entertainment services.
Make PC and video phone calls. Visit amusement parks and casinos. Meet members
of clubs and associations. See
Virtual Helsinki 2000
for an example.
These "wild" ideas are already around, but it will take time before they
are generally available all over the globe. New networks need to be in place.
Powerful communications equipment must be provided.
We also see the contours of
speech-based electronic conferences with automatic translation to and from
the participants' languages. Entries will be stored as text in a form that
allows for advanced online searching. We may be able to choose between the
following options:
-
Use voice when entering messages, rather than typing them in through the
keyboard. The ability to mix speech, text, sound and pictures (single frames
or live pictures).
-
Have messages delivered to you by voice, as text, or as a combination of
these (like in a lecture with visual aids).
-
Have text and voice converted to a basic text, which may in turn be converted
to other languages, and be forwarded to its destination as text or voice
depending on the recipients' preferences.
Pointer: CompuServe's multilingual machine translation
of its MacCIM Help Forum and World Community Forum messages. Every three
minutes, English messages in the forums are translated into German, Spanish
and French and German. Spanish and French messages are translated into English.
Regardless of which language
version of CompuServe a user has, the user may choose whether translated
messages in the forums are received in English, German or French.
Rates
The Internet is pressing commercial service rates. There is a trend away
from charging by the minute or hour. Many services convert to subscription
prices, a fixed price by the month, quarter or year.
Other services, among them
some major database services, let users pay for what they get (no cure, no
pay). MCI Mail was one of the first. There, you only pay when you send or
read mail. On IQuest, you pay a fixed price for a fixed set of search results.
Anyone who buys an Internet
connection can in principle be a reseller of Internet access services. This
presses the cost of Internet access towards cost. In turn, new technologies
promise to reduce access providers' costs dramatically. They also promise
to reduce the importance of a provider's geographical locations. The users
win.
Cheaper transfers of data
Privatization of the national telephone monopolies has opened further for
more alternatives. Possible scenarios:
-
Free access to the Internet in exchange for receipt of advertisements.
-
In 1998, several organizations began offering free Internett access in countries
such as Denmark, Sweden, United Kingdom.
-
Major companies selling extra capacity from their own internal networks,
-
Telecommunications companies exporting their services at extra low prices,
-
Other pricing schemes (like a fixed amount per month with unlimited usage),
-
New technology (direct transmitting satellites, FM, etc.)
Increased global competition will press end users' communications costs down
toward the magic zero.
Powerful new search tools
As the amount of available information increases, the development of adequate
finding tools is gaining momentum. Still, finding and using what we can get
remains a major problem, and particularly on the Internet.
Personal information agents,
whether they be called "knowbots" or other things, will increasingly do a
better job at scanning databases and other information offerings for specific
information at a user's bidding. Gradually, this may make specialists' knowledge
of what sources to use redundant.
Search services will gradually
cope better with the Internet's growth in Web pages and offerings, across
language and cultural barriers, and offer indexes updated by the minute.
Some of these features will
be built into your local software or operations systems, while others will
be services offered through the net. Some will exploit the hypertext concept,
universal data linking, massive cross- indexing of information, dynamic
customization of your interactions to the various services, and more.
Artificial intelligence will
increase the value of searches, as they can be based on your personal searching
history since your first day as a user.
Your personal information
agents will make automatic decisions about what is important and what is
not in a query. When you get information back, it will even be ranked by
what seems to be closest to your query.
Sources for future studies
Let's end this chapter with some online services and sources focusing on
the future:
Internet Surveys is a free
monthly newsletter that digests the most important surveys and reports on
the Internet.
The European Commission publishes
an "Information Society
Trends" newsletter. You can subscribe to receive it by email .
Usenet has the
comp.society.futures newsgroup -
about "Events in technology affecting future computing."
Dataquest, a U.S. market research
firm, often offers interesting free texts. George Gilder's interesting views
on the communications revolution and its implications for the future are
at
http://www.forbes.com/asap/gilder/.
Why not complement what you
find here by monitoring trends in associated areas (like music), to follow
the development from different perspectives?
It is tempting to add a list
of conferences dedicated to science fiction, but I'll leave that pleasure
to you.
Have a nice trip!
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