Remember when you first heard about the World Wide Web? Remember the promise of limitless information from millions of computers, "the world's largest library"? Then you found it was more like the world's largest library after a burglary, with all the books thrown in a heap in the middle of the floor. Where was the organisation? Where was the kindly librarian?
A new Massachusetts company is hoping to inject the Web with a dose of organisation with The Password (www.thepassword.com), a Website where fresh information on hundreds of popular subjects is gathered daily into online passWorlds (think of them as magazines) with a table of contents.
Created and maintained by a team of editors with the aid of Web search-and-filter `bots', The Password's library of 400-plus magazines is most useful if you're seeking information on general subjects; pregnancy, Egypt, Java (the programming language, not the island), chocolate and dogs spring to mind. Users can browse the library's subject headings to find the magazine they like, or can enter keywords. We found in tests that single-word keyword searches work best...the system didn't cope well with phrases of even two words.
Because The Password draws contents for its magazines directly from the Web, a patient trawl through Web directories like Yahoo! or Lycos (a sister company of The Password) should lead to similar information. In practice, however, The Password excels in general-topic searches.
Compare The Password's Chocolate magazine with information on the same subject from Yahoo!, which is organised hierarchically.
To find general information about chocolate in Yahoo!, you'd need to look under the category of Entertainment, then under Food and Eating, Types of Foods, Desserts and Sweets, Chocolate.
At The Password, meanwhile, the magazine devoted to chocolate includes a table of contents with links to chocolate stories in the news, plus recipes, resources like online chocolate shops and Valentine's Day Websites, and a section on chocolate-themed games and trivia.
All sections of the magazine are updated by the magazine's editors and the `bots', which constantly scour the Internet for fresh content.
If the library doesn't have a magazine on your favourite subject, you can follow the instructions to create your own title, telling the `bots' where to look on the Web to retrieve information. We found it relatively simple to create a rather eclectic magazine - we wanted information about poetry in general, daily poems from the Web, and gossip on selected Star Trek characters.
No content appeared immediately in our poetico/sci-fi magazine, but within 24 hours the system had obediently retrieved an interview with Brent Spiner, some neat poems and some information about Emily Dickinson.
Registered users can also choose to publish their custom magazines; they are each given a unique URL where they or anyone else can view their handiwork.
As you might expect, The Pass- word is ideal for hobbyists, many of whom will find a ready-made, comprehensive magazine waiting for them in the library.
The best titles are those that have been in the library the longest, such as the American Civil War magazine, featuring sections on famous battles, prominent figures like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, magnificent selections of primary resources such as letters, diaries, newspaper articles, maps and a great deal more.
"After we developed the Civil War magazine - and that's a subject on which, of course, there's no `news' as such - it seemed that there was nothing we could come up with that couldn't benefit from the organisational structure we had developed," said Margaret Heffernan, CEO of The Password. "People do want order, they do want structure, and the chaos of the Web is rapidly becoming demotivating, not thrilling."
The Password's organisation is also a boon for advertisers, who can target their message with amazing precision. In the Marketplace section of The Password are advertisements for hiking gear along with pointers to the library's Everest magazine; ads for cookery books, similarly, let the visitor link back to magazines on gourmet dining or healthy cooking. Heffernan said she hopes to match retailers with content wherever possible, including in the various Irish magazines.
"We would like to have a relationship with a company like Kilkenny Design Centre, for example, inside our Irish magazine," Heffernan said. "As long as merchants ship to the US, we'll do business with them."
According to Heffernan, future plans for the company include liaison with educators, who can use The Password to teach students both about a particular subject and about research methods. The eventual goal is to help schools publish their own magazines online, which will not only let students show their work to the world, but can also lead to real collaboration with distant classrooms. Says Heffernan, The Pass- word is all about community, that elusive Internet term whose real significance has yet to be established.
"This concept of `community' has been a buzzword for about a year, which in Internet terms means it should be about dead by now, but we're only just beginning to understand what it means...and it has to mean being better off together than we are separately," says Heffernan. "It's about shared information and shared expertise. If you talk about community, information is the campfire around which we all huddle."
Sheila McDonald is at smcdonal@iol.ie