Bruce Cohen
Way of the dodo
THE great guru of electronic media, Roger Fiddler, has sentenced Anton Harber to 10 more years. Fiddler, speaking at a recent conference in Bali, forecast the end of print journalism by the year 2005 and its replacement with electronic “tablets” and other digital media.
He says the superior economics and attributes of “digital ink” and “silicon paper” will ultimately make total conversion to the new form of publishing irresistible.
I picked up this titbit at a new Web site called Media Central (http://www.mediacentral.com), which is the place to be if you’re in the media/advertising world — and want to stay there after 2005!
It includes a daily news service on happenings in the media world, and carries a whack of stuff from Folio magazine (probably the best mag for publishers in the US) as well as Direct (the mag for direct marketers), and several interactive forums on topical publishing issues.
Green telecoms
AN interim report summarising submissions on the Green Paper on Telecommunications policy is on the Web. To find out who said what about the future of telecoms in South Africa, go to http://wn.apc.org/technology/telecoms/narrev.html
Index on the Web
INDEX on Censorship, one of the most authoritative monitors of freedom of expression in the world, has made an excellent debut on the Web (http://www.oneworld.org/index_oc/index.html)
The site includes the latest edition of Index (which spotlights the future of the United Nations), and also includes material from back issues as well as a country guide to censorship and freedom of expression.
Whack a site
I DON’T usually give software a punt, but I recommend you download a demo version of Forefront’s Webwhacker
It’s an extraordinarily useful tool that enables you to quickly “whack” an entire Web site, downloading all linked files, including graphics, in one go. You can then browse/read the contents
I’ve found it great for retrieving information from various sites which is broken up into a series of linked files. Instead of laboriously clicking on each file and then saving it to disk, Webwhacker allows you to grab all the files at once. It even creates an hypertext index of the site you’ve whacked.
It’s especially useful for grabbing software manuals. The demo version lasts for 30 days. It will cost you $50 for the real thing. Windows and Mac versions available.
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