12/17/00

Something is happening. Yes, a lot of dot coms are going out of business, but that isn't the real story. As I surf the net looking for links and information to use on SciFan, I find more and more dead sites, or sites that haven't been updated for years. The other day I hit an email button on a site and got a message back from a guy who thought his site had been taken down ages ago and was surprised to discover it was still up and delivering pages over the ethernet.

There are two major forces creating pages on the internet. The first are businesses hoping to make a profit. The second are people having fun and publishing stuff about their hobbies and interests. SciFan makes a tiny amount of money but is definitely a hobby site run by two people: Olivier Travers in Paris, and me, Jim Harris in Memphis. And we struggle to keep SciFan going.

Sometimes one, or both of us, can't put in the time on SciFan and it goes unchanged for awhile. Olivier and Sophie just had a new baby girl, and they are moving and starting a new business, so he will have very little time for SciFan for the next few months. I plan to go back to graduate school in January. Don't worry, I'm not announcing we are closing. I'm just warning that SciFan might not change much for awhile.

Look at the What's New section on the Internet SF Database, the largest and best SF&F bibliographic tool on the net. Al von Ruff has had to take some time off too, but he's back and updating information again. The long term hobbyists have to find ways to come and go or else the work will kill them. You just plug away the best you can.

Most people starting a web site have no idea how much work is involved and they quit early in the game. I think over time the long haul people will become obvious, but even for them it is almost impossible to keep going forever. Burnout is a big issue. Over time we will see trends developing on the internet that will reflect a solution. In the Open Source Software world if a programmer gives up sometimes another programmer will take over. Other times a group of ever changing personnel will form around a software project like the Apache web server software.

Recently I came across the Open Source Systems for Librarians website. This site monitors information and programs used in library automation that is open sourced. This is interesting to me because SciFan is essentially a bibliographic tool, something that used to only be found in libraries. We are a free reference library service. This type of work is usually done by academic publishers and they have to make a profit to stay in business. Or the work is done by librarians as part of their job and published in library journals. Either way, there is a system to pay for the work.

Who knows, someday librarians might be doing the work like we do here at SciFan or like at the Internet SF Database, which is compiling extensive bibliographic databases for free consumption over the Internet. If you look at the history of bibliographic work, you will see that much of the information is collected over and over again by various people and publishers. Logically, I would think the perfect SF&F database would be built and then maintained and shared by everyone. Why keep reinventing the wheel? Who will do the job though?

What about the Library of Congress? Or the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc? In the library world there are commercial databases that people pay to use, but on the Internet people expect information for free. Right now that work is being done by volunteers. If any of us decide to close up shop, our data usually disappears from the web. What we need is a system to pass on the data. Another issue is we all collect data in different forms and assemble it in different ways. What is needed is a standard. XML is an emerging standard to transfer data over the Internet. Libraries have the MARC Record standard for classifying and cataloging information in libraries. I don't know if there are standards for bibliographies.

Sooner or later I think some agency or organization will take on the task. I don't see any profit in the job, so I expect it to be a governmental or public organization like the Library of Congress, or a group like the Apache Software Foundation. This brings me back to my opening paragraph. I said there were two forces putting information on the web. I think the emerging new force will be Open Source groups, or nonprofit volunteer agencies. It will be a new form of distributed processing and it will combine both computers and humans. Information will behave like gravity and information particles will come together to form informational planetary systems and galaxies.

Al von Ruff's ISFDB is a huge start in that direction. If it was combined with all the information that Locus Magazine has both in print, on the web and on CD-ROM, plus include a few other bibliographic works you would have one hell of a SF&F database. SciFan could close down, as well as hundreds of other SF&F sites. It would become the black hole for SF&F information. Why compete? If you had ten photos of Robert A. Heinlein taken at an old WorldCon, would you put them online on your web site, or would you give them to the SF&F Superbase? If you were a reviewer with fifteen years of reviews that you wanted to put into public domain, where would you publish them? Why not tie them directly to the bibliographic records for each title reviewed?

If you are publisher that just bought the rights to reprint a science fiction writer's back catalog in ebook form where would be the best place to advertise the fact? Why not list each title with the bibliographic title record? Here at SciFan we tie links to Amazon, several out-of-print databases and an auction search site to each title. If we had the time and manpower we'd tie every possible bookseller we could find to each title, as well as every possible bit of information.

There Internet has not peaked. It is going through some growing pains. I think it will mutate into something new. It will just take time. In the end, I think the two major forces for publishing free information on the web will be commercial and nonprofit organizations. Individuals, for the most part won't be able to keep up. Commercial businesses are finding it very difficult to make a profit on the web but they will find many ways for publishing free information that support their business bottom line. It will be interesting to see if nonprofit organizations can maintain the momentum over the long haul. What would happen if Linus quit programming Linux? Or if the main programmers of Gnome all gave up?

The information in the story below could disappear. Copyrights actually help kill off information. The history of Amazing Stories was resurrected by Wizards.com when they bought the magazine. It was nice that they put it online for all to use. Otherwise, Mike Ashley's effort to remember the great SF magazine would be forgotten along with the magazine. Most of the volunteer work on the Internet produces freely available information. Most of the good information in the world is locked into copyrights, and fairly so. Yet, most of that copyrighted information will never make any additional money for the authors that created the information.

I think the final stage of the bibliographic superbase will be to link in the actual work. The work will either be free or linked to a payment system. The end result will be a universal library. That is why I thought Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc might be interested in running the SF&F superbase project. In other words there might be a hybrid system of a nonprofit organization that helps maintain the profitability of information produced by its members.

I don't think the Internet has peaked. We just don't really know what it will become.