Mike Butcher

Even as the light has long dimmed on the dotcom boom, and the feverish partying is now just a faint hangover, the technology crowd is massing once more.

But this time, instead of clamouring at the bar at a packed-out First Tuesday event, Britain’s e-business people are hitting the web sites before hitting the bars.

This time it’s not about WANs, Wi-Fi or wireless networking, but real live networking, enhanced and aided by web sites built specially from the ground up to connect people.

The vanguard of this revival is a site that emerged from Silicon Valley. In October 2000, during the dotcom meltdown, San Francisco-based entrepreneur Adrian Scott decided to create a site that could help his friends maintain their network of contacts between career changes. Members of Ryze.org can post information about themselves, a list of their friends, and leave private messages for each other. It turned out there were side benefits.

"At an average party, you spend all that time going through the first introductions, but on Ryze you’ve got a profile that gets you through that awkward stage," says Scott. "It’s like a *censored*tail party where everyone is wearing a resume."

Last December, Ryze’s popularity escalated and it started to introduce extra subscription-based services. In February, Europeans started posting themselves on to the site. There are now around 14,000 members, and Scott says the site is breaking even. There are Ryze drinks parties in most major US cities, and a London event is on the cards.

Of course, sites where people "network" are not new. Similar sites such as PlanetAll and Sixdegrees.com emerged and faded in the late 1990s. PlanetAll was bought by Amazon and Sixdegrees.com was sold in 1999 – before the crash – for $125 million.

Here in the UK, the combination of a burgeoning interest in blogging and the buzz around Ryze has been joined by the re-launch of the four-and-a-half-year-old Ecademy.com, a free, monthly networking group for e-business people that features regular speakers.

Inspired by his wife Penny,

Thankfully I was wrong. It turned out I hadn’t been recognised by my photo in NMA, but the one on Ecademy.com, the networking site which last week announced its intention to reach 10,000 active members by next year.

So this is the state of business in the new millennium. Meeting people who we have encountered on Web sites. As bland and somewhat geekish as that sounds, it’s going to become the norm, especially in the Internet business (assuming it isn’t already).

Sure, we’re all used to meeting people after an email introduction or a posting on a newsgroup. What’s different is that social and business networks are now forming after encounters through Web sites that have been specially designed to network people with each other.

Like most, the idea is an old one. Back in the pre-Internet boom of the mid-1990s, a Web site called sixdegrees.com appeared claiming to link users with everyone in the world via six other people. The name was inspired by the play Six Degrees of Separation.

In this experimental phase of the Internet, the user numbers were relatively low and, of course, most of the users were American. But the technology was pretty sophisticated for its time. You could see who was on the site at that moment (quite an achievement in 1996) and even do something called instant messaging. Through various algorithms you could see who was linked to you and who they, in turn, were linked to.

Sixdegrees.com no longer exists, but the ideas it gave birth to spread. Certainly, we all know about Instant Messaging now.

The latest ‘poster child’ of networking sites is Ryze.org, a US West Coast start-up which uses clever tools to allow you to ’surf’ the people in your network. Lately the Ecademy.com network in the UK has enhanced it’s own networking facilities and hopes to build its membership to the point of critical mass, where the whole thing becomes self-perpetuating with no marketing needed.

What’s clear about the trend towards networking tools online is that they’re meeting real needs. There’s the simple but crucial one of allowing freelancers and sole traders to build their network of contacts, and thus business. But they also reflect the wider social trend of the future towards individuals marketing themselves.

It’s a world where, to borrow a phrase, there’s no such thing as company loyalty. A world where business is constantly changing, careers constantly shifting and individuals increasingly work for more than one company at once. Being able to tap into an online network where you can maintain your own constant presence whatever job you do, and can hook into the network of others, is a highly valuable proposition. And it’s a proposition for the future.

First published: http://www.nma.co.uk/nma/story.asp?id=237264

When a newspaper’s front page hits the newsstands, it creates, so the saying goes, the first draft of history. But how much history can news websites contribute, when their "front pages" rarely linger more than a single day? And will the trend towards charging for access to online archives eventually destroy the historical archives of the new media industry?

It was thoughts like these which began to occur to online publishing expert Norbert Specker as he surfed news websites following the events of September 11 last year. "When I saw three different entry pages to CNN within 10 minutes on September 11, I realised: the history of the net was being built – and destroyed – within minutes," he says. Specker, the founder of the influential Zurich-based Interactive Publishing, began taking screen shots of news sites as they updated their coverage hourly. Last week, as part of the many online commemorations of September 11, he re-launched the archive, which includes images of 230 news sites from around the world: www.interactivepublishing.net/september.

Specker believes many of the screen shots are the only witness to what the world’s news sites looked like on that day, since very few online publications keep screen grabs of their pages. The 9/11 archive is a non-profit venture which has been visited by 500,000 people in the past year, says Specker, but this historical document could ultimately become a drain on resources as more and more people visit. However, he believes it’s a "responsibility that cannot be shed like a coat. So either way we have to find a way to ensure the survival of the pages, either by sponsors or co-operating with museums."

Specker is by no means alone in his desire to see web history preserved, despite the commercial pressures. Other notable sites include Google.com, which "caches" old sites, and the Internet Archive in San Francisco, which is a non-profit organisation, supported by donations from organisations like the Smithsonian Institute. Chairman Brewster Kahle first had the idea of archiving internet material back in the 1980s. After co-founding Alexa.com – which created a method of indexing web sites – Kahle founded the Internet Archive in 1996.

It receives a donated copy of Alexa’s index every six months consisting of 10bn web pages dating back to 1996. The Archive’s "Wayback Machine" now receives around 20,000 search requests a day. Despite its popularity, one main threat looms over this laudable venture. With a cash-strapped online publishing world starting to charge for archive access, some publishers are getting highly sensitive about where their content ends up. And there’s plenty of money at stake.

Research firm Jupiter Media Metrix reported last year that archived content online has the potential to become a $6.3bn market by 2006, up from $2.2bn in 2001. "The vast majority of people are happy to be in the archive, but if they don’t we just retroactively remove them," Kahle explains. "A number of publishers have done that because they want to sell access to their own archive."

Actions like this could threaten the integrity of the archive for generations. Kahle believes there should still be a role for non-commercial online archives to record web history. "We have to figure out the mechanism to keep some level of access to newspapers because if the news is not recorded then we enter Orwellian territory – those who control the past control the present; those who control the present control the future." Although there is often intense pressure to put an admission fee on to publisher archives, keeping them "open access" may actually make good commercial sense, according to Specker. He argues that there’s a direct correlation between open archives and the long-term brand image of a news organisation. Media firms which close their digital archives in order to charge for access will prevent their brands becoming "papers of reference" because "many stories live on in links," he says.

There may also be a financial cost – Jupiter says online publishers will lose revenues it if they don’t deal with third- party archives. Online archives are not just attracting attention for historical or commercial reasons, however. Kahle admits US government agencies – under the pretext of anti-terrorism measures – have asked that allegedly "sensitive information" be deleted from the Internet Archive.

Often it has fallen to investigative journalism sites like TheMemoryHole.org to re-publish uncontroversial "removed" information. And it’s not just governmental jitters which endangers the integrity of web archives. Adam Macarthur, an intel lectual property layer with the Eversheds legal practice, points out that archiving websites without permission or licence could potentially constitute a massive breach of copyright. However, when it comes to sites like the Internet Archive, "Whether a media firm would actually bother to take action [against a non-commercial body] is another story."

Patrick White, founder of the British Web Design Association, believes that far from endangering copyright, facilities like the Internet Archive could make copyright disputes far simpler. "If one site has a dispute it can turn to the Archive and check what their site looked like when the alleged infringement took place. And the whole thing is backed by the reputable Smithsonian."

However, not everyone sees the point of archiving the "look and feel" of websites. British design consultant Nico Macdonald, who is writing a book about designing for the internet, believes archiving whole websites with the original appearance intact is largely unnecessary, so long as the raw content (text and images) is captured. "People are driven by email links deep into sites so they don’t see the site’s front page anyway," he says. For Macdonald, sites like the Internet Archive rarely appeal to anyone apart from students of web design history.

How do news sites react to the thought of their pages being archived by someone else? Hugo Drayton, head of Hollinger Telegraph New Media, believes archiving web pages as well as the text doesn’t make sense. "I’m sceptical about the ultimate value since most online news sites don’t show the hierarchy of stories in the same way the printed page does," he points out. The Telegraph has instead been working with interactive agency Olive Software on an experimental project to digitise the actual newspaper into a visual, click-able entity.

The battle to preserve history versus the battle to make money online looks like continuing to rage on. What is clear is that many of our memories of the web continue to be lost. "Since 1994 the web has grown immensely," says Specker. "But without an archive of what the web looked like then and since, the new media industry will have nothing to show for its history." Perhaps it will be condemned to repeat it.

First published: http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,7558,792675,00.html