ISWonline at 10: a long, strange trip.As far as I'm concerned, Harry Urban, not Al Gore Noun 1. Al Gore - Vice President of the United States under Bill Clinton (born in 1948) Albert Gore Jr., Gore , invented the Internet. At the very least, it was my long-term colleague who introduced me to the Internet before I had the capability of connecting to the World Wide Web on my own. It was early August of 1995 when Harry, then publisher of Wood & Wood Products and Custom Woodworking Business, summoned me to his office to get a first-hand Lesson about the World Wide Web. He had Logged onto a chat room in which people were pouring their hearts out over the death of Jerry Garcia, guitarist and leader of the Grateful Dead. I don't recall any specific threads posted by the grieving grieving Mourning, see there Dead Heads, but I do know that I instantly grasped the enormous power of the Web and its phenomenal ability to spread information around the globe and connect like-minded people from anywhere in real time. My mind raced at the possibilities of disseminating dis·sem·i·nate v. dis·sem·i·nat·ed, dis·sem·i·nat·ing, dis·sem·i·nates v.tr. 1. To scatter widely, as in sowing seed. 2. information to a wider professional woodworking audience more quickly. Thus began my personal long, strange trip into cyberspace Coined by William Gibson in his 1984 novel "Neuromancer," it is a futuristic computer network that people use by plugging their minds into it! The term now refers to the Internet or to the online or digital world in general. See Internet and virtual reality. Contrast with meatspace. , an odyssey Odyssey (ŏd`ĭsē): see Homer. Odyssey Homer’s long, narrative poem centered on Odysseus. [Gk. Lit.: Odyssey] See : Epic Odyssey that continues as we observe the 10th birthday of our Web site, Industrial Strength Woodworking, www.iswonline. com. It's an occasion worth celebrating and to pause and reflect on where we were, where we are and where we're headed. We Were, Where We The Sept. 19, 1996 Launch of ISWonline resulted in one of my personal favorite columns. It consisted of the large ISWonline icon, a bright yellow 55-gallon barrel bearing "Barrel Bear" is the seventh episode of the television show Wonderfalls. Plot Synopsis Jaye helps the first woman to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel to regain some of her celebrity, until another woman shows up saying that she actually went over the Falls in the W&WP, CWB CWB Canadian Wheat Board CWB Central Weather Bureau CWB Canadian Welding Bureau CWB Causeway Bay (Hong Kong) CWB Corpus Workbench CWB Certified Wildlife Biologist CWB Child Welfare Board and ISW ISW Institut für Steuerungstechnik der Werkzeugmaschinen und Fertigungseinrichtungen (Institute for Control Engineering of Machine Tools and Manufacturing Units, University of Stuttgart, Germany) ISW Information Survivability Workshop logos, and a brief editors note instructing readers to log onto iswonline.com to read the column. I think it was a clever way of trying to draw readers' attention to the new Web site. As a side benefit, it bought me a couple of extra days to actually write the column because of the Lag time between getting all of the pages to the printer and mailing the issue. I can't rightly say how many readers heeded my call and logged onto ISW or how much traffic ISW generated in its first month of service. I can, however, say that visitor traffic continues to increase each year. Indeed, 58,575 unique visitors A count of how many different people access a Web site. For example, if a user leaves and comes back to the site five times during the measurement period, that person is counted as one unique visitor, but would count as five "user sessions. came to ISWonline Last month, 14,860 of which visited two times or more. In comparison, ISWonline hosted 47,157 unique visitors in August 2005. Where We're Headed We take a lot of pride in ISWonline and continually look for ways to improve it as an information resource for the woodworking industry. To this end, we are busily working on an extensive redesign and reformatting of ISWonline, plus working on developing separate Web sites for W&WP and CWB. Our goal is to have these sites, plus new Looks for RedBookOnline and CLOSETS magazine's Web site, up and running by early October. The wild card to assigning a precise date to the Launch of the ISW family of Web sites is the time it will take to reclassify Verb 1. reclassify - classify anew, change the previous classification; "The zoologists had to reclassify the mollusks after they found new species" class, classify, sort out, assort, sort, separate - arrange or order by classes or categories; "How would you 10 years worth of feature archives into the new Web platforms. We Guarantee It Will Be Worth the Wait The new Web sites will sport a more contemporary look, have better internal search engine capabilities for mining information and include a better system of cross indexing information by topic or issue date. We also have several new features in mind that will be rolled out in future months. Coinciding with this effort is a redoubling of our efforts to provide the most comprehensive news coverage of the wood products industry as possible on a timely basis. To achieve this, we have increased the staff of the ISW News Team from three to six editors. In addition to generating fresh news copy and editing press releases to post online, the members of this team will scour scour, scours 1. the chemical and physical cleaning of fleece wool. 2. diarrhea. dietetic scour see dietary diarrhea. peat scour see secondary nutritional copper deficiency. the Web for news from international, national and local newspapers, periodicals and other Web-based sources to keep on top of breaking news such as plant openings and closings, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory news and more. The Right Information Is Everything Information has always been at the core of W&WP's mission. W&WP and its extended family of publications pledge to continue providing readers with a well-rounded mix of news and features pertaining per·tain intr.v. per·tained, per·tain·ing, per·tains 1. To have reference; relate: evidence that pertains to the accident. 2. to the markets each serves. The pledge of ISWonline and its related Web sites is to do all that and more on an expedited basis. As always, we look forward to hearing your comments about what more we can do to serve your needs that will help your business prosper. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail at rchristianson @vancepubtishing.com. |
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