Letter to the Editor

As a Mosaic junkie, I read with great interest Chris Trimble's article Making Information Technology Useful in the February 1st issue. Mr. Trimble makes several keen observations regarding the difficulty of finding information on the Web. However, I think he misses the mark in recommending a centralization of Web information.

Using centralized servers to store all of the information present on the Web presents a whole battery of problems. Who would fund the enormous amount of disk space and processor power to resource such an endeavor? Judging by the collection of ftp sites in existence around the world, and extending that by considering the space needed for multimedia sounds and pictures, it quickly becomes obvious that centralization would be no small undertaking. Furthermore, recommending that commercial businesses assume the responsibility is jumping in bed with the devil -- how safe is the free speech of a competitor's Mosaic page, or criticism of the hosting company? What company could responsibly use its precious profit margin to store the Cindy Crawford Showcase?

Let me offer another option: a global Registry of Mosaic pages. Not an index pointing to indices pointing to indices, but a single collection of pointers to the wonders that exist on the Web. For example, when the UIUC chapter of the ACM decided to make its own home page, they would then have the option of publishing it with the Registry. Web Surfers could then use this Registry as a baseline. (NCSA is currently providing the service most like this, by the way, in its "What's New" pages.)

The beauty of the Web is in its distributive nature -- freedom of expression reigns when one controls their own environment. Others may disagree, but I'll take mine distributed, thanks.