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skip@large
Copyright Skip Ploss and Acorn Press Newspapers.
c/net.com
In your never ending quest to make your life easier you need
as much help as you can get. You need sort of a one stop shopping
experience. You need cnet.com
[http://www.cnet.com]. In the world of web information, cnet
is the Danbury Fair Mall of technology resources and you've
packing plastic with no limit. Part website and part television
show, cnet is perhaps the perfect example of how to blend
this new resource with that of more traditional broadcast
media. Examples of how not to use it or the lack of understanding
on the part of the traditional media elite are many and it
is wonderful to see when someone gets it right. C/net Central
is broadcast weekly on cable, locally available on both The
Sci-fi Channel [http://www.scifi.com] and The USA Network
[currently no url] and this is where you'll see reports on
everything from the fabled cable web box to mini blimps with
cameras you may be able to control from your desktop.
The show is hosted by Richard Hart ( formerly the host,
still is in reruns, of The
Discovery Channel's [http://www.discovery.com] Next Step)
and Gina Saint John. Also on board is PC smartguy and guru
John Dvorak who provides entertaining reviews of the latest
CD-Roms offering "Buy It, Try It or Skip It (we will be talking
about some sort of royalty agreement on that last one) and
this is where the website comes in to it's own.
Just skip it
Lets say you want to see a review of a particular CD-Rom title
and you missed Señor Dvorak's comments (some of which
involve peanut butter) from a previous episode. You just sit
yourself down in front of your PC, fire up the web browser,
point the nose towards cnet and hang on. The "front door"
is graphically rich and presents you with a top feature article,
topics of which have included webphones, java browsers (java
is a new programming language developed by Sun
Microsystems [http://www.sun.com] which is to current
Hyper Text Markup Language based websites what digital video
is to still photography) and more. You also get current technology
headlines and news of the web, cnet radio, a movers and shakers
section, reviews and a product finder (a search engine for...you
guessed it, products). That's just the first section.
The "Community" section includes member services (currently
over 350,000. It's free and when I joined back in July it
was 36,000) a place to post messages to fellow members or
"talk" about events and technology, an online poll (as of
this writing "should the FCC ban webphones?") and a tour including
a camera which takes a picture of the studio every 60 seconds.
The next section is devoted to "Resources". This includes
an information source and "tech central". Also included is
what used to be called "The Virtual Software Library". VSL
has been exploded into what should be your first and last
choice for free and share ware, shareware.com
[http://www.shareware.com]. Shareware.com is now an entity
of it's own. It is a searchable catalog of over 150,000 pieces
of downloadable software for Mac, Unix, Sun, Silicon Graphics
and PC based machines. You can search for a specific title
or by file extension (you know, like .eps). SDC not only tells
you where the item you are looking for is archived but which
site is the most reliable to download from.
Last but not least is the "Marketplace". An area for reading
the latest "Hot Deals" and seeing a list of companies which
advertise on the pages of c/net.
All in all this site is a websurfer's dream come true and
a site which I use daily (often more than once). It truly
is the motherlode and you can come away every time with as
much as you can carry. But don't hurt yourself, cnet will
be there tomorrow.
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