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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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Random Rumblings

Mailing Lists: When you subscribe to a mailing list, you usually get an 
initial welcome message. Buried in a dead obvious place is a note about 
how to unsubscribe from the list. Save this message! Sooner or later 
you're going to want to unsubscribe. Simply sending a message to the 
list saying "Jane, get me off of this crazy thing" isn't going to do it.

Java: So Java will let you run a program half a world away. Great. What 
program? I'll wait for the Java killer app before I give up my non-
crippling version of Netscape 1.1. Anyone have an idea what the killer 
app might be? It's worth $20 billion.

$500 Internet Appliance: It's here today. It's called a used 386. Give 
me, instead, a $500 notebook. Nothing fancy, except maybe a good 
keyboard. Toss in a simple word processor, a terminal program, and a 
built-in modem. Make it run off of rechargeables I can buy at Radio 
Shack.

Edit Your Folllow-ups: Take a close look at what newsgroups your 
responses are going to. Odds are, if you're jumping into the fray after 
several days, the message has lost its relevance to half the groups. 
Trim groups that no longer seem to apply.

Edit Your Subjects: Why is it that new human rights legislation always 
makes wired rednecks simultaneously discover net.news and their caps 
lock key? (They never discover how to create messages with proper line 
lengths, however.) Users you've never seen before suddenly start dumping 
rants onto net.news. Has surfing for Pamela Anderson pics really lost 
its appeal? 

Just one tip if you're going to put a knuckle-dragger in his place -- 
think about editing the subject line so you don't perpetuate an 
offensive message to casual observers. Change the subject in your 
follow-up to reflect your position. Or follow the lead of tor.general 
regular Shawn Berry (sberry@ivory.trentu.ca) who warps the subject lines 
of loathsome posts into amusing witticisms.

V-Chip: Haven't parents always had low-tech versions of the V-Chip, 
namely the off switch and the 9 pm bed time? If parents aren't using 
those, what makes people think they'll fiddle with some new chip?

Web Builders: Remember, not everyone surfs with Netscape 2.x. Don't make 
your pages accessible by only one company's browser. The last thing the 
industry needs is another monopoly.

Promoting Your Page: Anyone else getting tired of people promoting their 
"cool new" web page on newsgroups that have nothing to do with what 
their web page is about? Just because the page is run out of Toronto 
doesn't mean an announcement is on topic in groups like tor.eats, 
tor.news, or can.infohighway. First figure out what the newsgroups are 
about and then figure out if announcements are appropriate.

As Reverend Jim Carroll has preached many times, the net is about 
marketing not advertising. Show people you have something to offer by 
providing on-topic content and then let them find your cherished site in 
a sig line. Slow and steady... as they say.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

               ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs)                   ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson)