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Re: Website Reliability



Wow - an actual discussion about an article.
What a pleasant Monday surprise.

Peter Kurilecz (who we can thank for posting the
url to the original article) commented:

>What is even more interesting is the following quote:
>
>"... the librarians rated only 27 percent of them (websites viewed by the
>students) as suitable for academic research."
>
>If one did the same rating for the standard public library what percentage
>of the library would be considered suitable for academic research.  (could
>it be a case of the pot calling the kettle black?)

Frankly Peter I don't know what public libraries have to do with it.
The quote comes from a University of Southern Colorado Study of
middle and high schools. I'm willing to bet that even middle school
and high school libraries probably beat the 27 percent. Certainly
no pot calling the kettle black here  ;-)

Peter continues with a discussion about commercialism. While I agree
with Peter's sense of irony (in my case I chuckle about the claims of
free speech on the internet, by the same people who want to regulate
SPAM, which is after all business speech), I think the idea that "capitalism

and commercials (egad!) are fueling the growth of the internet" is quite
debatable.

The internet was built and is still partially subsidized by public funds.
Business is still clinging to its tax subsidy, which will hopefully be
rectified by a tax on internet sales. The dot-coms are a small minority
of websites, and it looks like we will be losing many of them over the
coming year or two.

An interesting question is whether the business community can
afford to let amazon.com go under when they run out of money
next year. Consumer confidence in the internet is fairly low, what
will happen to that when the flagship dot-com goes under?

Commercialism is not fueling the growth of the internet, it is just
screaming the loudest for your attention.

Craig Wright
___________________________________
Craig G. Wright
Associate Curator of Manuscript Acquisitions
Minnesota Historical Society
651.296.7989           craig.wright@mnhs.org

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation
for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
        -Kierkegaard

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