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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
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*                                                            *
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Unless you've only been using the Internet to spread 
an envelope-stuffing scam, you've encountered the 
biggest thing to hit the net since the Netscape: so-
called push technology. To review, "pull" technologies 
like the web require you to go out and find 
information yourself; "push" technology sends you a 
packet of information based on a few user-selected 
specifications.

There are a dozen or so push services offering news, 
reviews, and weather. Most services let you customize 
your newsfeed. For example, if I want to know who gets 
awarded the contract for the F-22 not who wins the 
Stanley Cup, I can have my push service exclude sports 
but include aviation news in my feed.

Push services are free, paid for by banner 
advertising. The services split the ad revenue with 
the news organizations supplying the content.

Despite predictions in the early days that the net was 
a threat to print, push offers newspapers a great 
opportunity to enhance revenue. Hundreds of dailies in 
North America create content that will never generate 
income beyond a geographical area. I'm never going to 
buy a paper copy of the Seattle Times. But if its 
technology section is included in a no-brainer 
electronic news packet, I'll happily glance at an HP 
banner to read industry gossip.

My exploration into push began a number of months ago 
with PointCast Canada (www.pointcast.ca). PointCast's 
hook is its proprietary newsreader that downloads the 
news (and ads) and lets you read offline.

Like about half the people who try the service, I got 
bored of PointCast. Reading news in front of a 
computer doesn't beat sitting in a Starbucks coffee 
shop on a Fall day, drinking cappuccino, and not 
caring soggy biscotti is soiling my Sunday Sun.

I haven't, however, abandoned push at my day job where 
I've got a fractional T1 wired to my NT desktop. It's 
a pretty sweet life -- a life enjoyed by a growing 
number as corporations are hoodwinked by cleverly 
worded "Intranet" proposals to hook employees to the 
net. It is the Fortune 500 work place that push 
providers really want to deliver to advertisers. Where 
else can HP reach a purchaser right before he or she 
orders a dozen new printers? 

My push provider at work is Yahoo! (see my.yahoo.com), 
which supplies an innovative news ticker you can set 
up to scroll continuously updated headline news at the 
bottom of your monitor. If something catches my eye, a 
click on the headline downloads the full story to my 
web browser. It's not with out faults. Yahoo's 
Canadian weather seems grossly inaccurate (even their 
current conditions) and it takes a while for some 
stories to drop off the spool. I stared at the 
headline "Motely Crue gets plastered at ceremony" for 
weeks before it mercifully vanished.

Despite being a daily push user, I'm not yet sure if 
it's a Good Thing. If push proves more popular than 
the web, it moves the net away from its focus on 
constitutionally protected speech to a unidirectional 
broadcast medium which governments have found very 
easy to control.

Let's hope push doesn't come to shove.

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