Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet.

Malamud: This is Geek of the Week. We’re talk­ing with Dale Dougherty who’s the pub­lish­er of GNN, the Global Network Navigator. He’s a staff mem­ber at O’Reilly & Associates, has been with the O’Reilly & Associates since they began pub­lish­ing obscure books on UUCP and man­ag­ing Usenet. Welcome to Geek of the Week, Dale.

Dale Dougherty: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Malamud: You’re the pub­lish­er of GNN. Why don’t you tell us what would GNN is.

Dougherty: Global Network Navigator… Well, per­haps if I start off say­ing we thought it would be cool to have an online mag­a­zine that was dis­trib­uted over the Internet. And we start­ed with that idea in ear­ly ​’93. And as we start­ed putting it togeth­er it sort of grew into more than just a mag­a­zine, and so we start­ed call­ing it an infor­ma­tion cen­ter. And in that infor­ma­tion cen­ter we have about four publications. 

We have a news week­ly, and the pri­ma­ry focus of the news week­ly is to pub­lish announce­ments, let peo­ple know about new ser­vices that’re com­ing on to the onto the Internet. 

Then we have a mag­a­zine, which is what our orig­i­nal idea was. And it was to devel­op sto­ries, take a theme, take a focus such as the gov­ern­ment and the Internet; our sec­ond issue will be edu­ca­tion and the Internet, what going on. So we have a broad­er can­vas with which to work and a lit­tle more sta­ble time­frame, mean­ing quar­ter­ly there for the magazine. 

And then the third pub­li­ca­tion is the Whole Internet Catalog. And many of—

Malamud: Which is Ed Krol’s book.

Dougherty: Right. We took the cat­a­log por­tion of the Krol book and we’re already start­ing to main­tain it for new addi­tions to the book. And we real­ly expand­ed it and put it online so that we could real­ly serve as an index to infor­ma­tion ser­vices that are avail­able on the net­work. So some­thing like if you are a biol­o­gist and you can come to the Whole Internet Catalog, look up under ​“biol­o­gy” and see what infor­ma­tion ser­vices are out there. And not only read about them but con­nect to—using Mosaic and the Web—to that actu­al ser­vice out there. 

Malamud: So you’ve tak­en the direc­to­ry part of Ed Krol’s book and instead of say­ing ​“You could FTP over to this site” you just put a lit­tle link in there [crosstalk] and then some­body actually— 

Dougherty: Right. And in many ways it’s com­plete­ly trans­par­ent to the user whether it’s a Gopher or an FTP or a Web site that they’re link­ing to.

Malamud: Okay. Well let’s go through those pieces one by one. We brought you on the show not just as a shame­less plug for one of our spon­sors, but actu­al­ly since you’re build­ing a busi­ness on the Internet it’s inter­est­ing to see what an online mag­a­zine infor­ma­tion cen­ter is gonna look like. You’ve got a newsweek­ly, does that mean you have reporters that work for you that’re going out there look­ing for news?

Dougherty: Well, pri­mar­i­ly we have an edi­to­r­i­al staff. And are we’re in the process of grow­ing sort of a report­ing staff of sort of free­lancers and peo­ple on staff. Pretty much know our edi­to­r­i­al staff is look­ing at things out there and try­ing to… You know, what hap­pens on the Internet in terms of these infor­ma­tion out­fits, you actu­al­ly hear of them you know, ​“Come to the net if you fol­low the right thing,” but often peo­ple put up a neat ser­vice and they say ​“Here it is.” They don’t tell you any­thing about it. So, a lot of what we do in the newsweek­ly is to just sim­ply go out, find the ser­vice, look through and say you know, on the whole these are the inter­est­ing things about this ser­vice and give it some char­ac­ter and talk to the peo­ple who’s putting it up why are they doing this. How long will it be up. Sort of the back­ground on a lot of the ser­vices is some­thing that we’re try­ing to make part of the foreground.

Malamud: So your newsweek­ly is about the net. You’re not going to some com­pa­ny press con­fer­ence where they’re appoint­ing a new vice pres­i­dent of sales and report­ing on that.

Dougherty: No. No. These pub­li­ca­tions are all aimed at Internet users for real­ly— You know, we use the phrase we try to be like Triple A of the Internet, a place to go to get infor­ma­tion about inter­est­ing things to do on the net, or where things are, how do I find out about neat things. Seems to me that on the Internet, if you join enough alias­es and enough mail­ing list you’ll hear about things. What we kind of want­ed to do is cre­ate a place where well, we’ll fol­low a lot of those lists and we’ll pub­lish on a reg­u­lar basis so that you can go into the news and say, ​“Oh, here are the new things that came on the net over the last two weeks or so.”

Malamud: Do you sum­ma­rize news­groups as well?

Dougherty: No, we don’t summarize—

Malamud: Because you could do some­thing very valu­able for me. If you could comp-priv on my behalf and just let me know once a month if some­thing happens…

Dougherty: Well. That’s some­thing— It’s an inter­est­ing direc­tion because I think it’s one of the things that— You know, our per­spec­tive is what can a pub­lish­er do to add val­ue on the Internet? Not exploit what’s there, but how can you add val­ue and in a way that peo­ple will pay for that val­ue. And I think digests are one of the key ways. It’s some­thing what we’re look­ing into down the road. In the Whole Internet Catalog, for instance, we’re sort of start­ing this by appoint­ing field edi­tors. Someone to take the mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gy top­ic and devel­op that as a…you know review the resources that are there and say these are good, these aren’t, fol­low new ones that are com­ing up. And also relate them to a broad­er world. Many of these resources, some­times they’re put up with­out any­one behind them. Meaning just some­one thought on a sun­ny day that it was a good idea to put them up. They’re not main­tained, they’re not updat­ed. You know. So part of the field edi­tor’s job is to say well you know, this is an online ver­sion of this print source, per­haps, but it’s not actu­al­ly spon­sored by the print source, or there’s some rela­tion­ship there that need to be made explicit. 

Malamud: Okay, so you have the book, and there you have area spe­cial­ists that track their areas. You have the newsweek­ly, and that’s kind of a flame of the day, inter­est­ing hack that I found. And the mag­a­zine seems to be in the mid­dle. It’s a quarterly…is there a theme for each magazine?

Dougherty: As I said ear­li­er, we’re try­ing to take a gen­er­al top­ic like like edu­ca­tion, like busi­ness, like gov­ern­ment, and col­lect— We basi­cal­ly have three sources for news. Some is the orig­i­nal report­ing where we’re hir­ing free­lancers to write arti­cles or peo­ple on staff; a lot of it’s staff-written. We also take arti­cles that have—we try to get rights to arti­cles that appear in print that we think have rel­e­vance to Internet users. In our first issue we had arti­cles from The Nation and from New Republic that served as sort of polit­i­cal con­nec­tions to the Internet. And the third source is to find infor­ma­tion that’s already on the net­work that may either be…just it lacks con­text. It does­n’t have—you know, often when you look at some pub­li­ca­tions, what they’re doing is tak­ing a speech or a col­lec­tion of arti­cles and putting them togeth­er in an inter­est­ing way and giv­ing some con­text for what’s of inter­est. Perhaps it’s excerpt­ing some of those arti­cles, um—

Malamud: Sequencing information.

Dougherty: Yeah, yeah.

Malamud: Taking data and putting it in, say­ing right here are the rel­e­vant bits and here’s the order your ough­ta read ​’em in.

Dougherty: Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, again it’s edi­to­r­i­al that we’re try­ing to put together.

Our primary—in all three of these pub­li­ca­tions is say­ing you know, what we think we can do—what O’Reilly can do as com­pa­ny is good edi­to­r­i­al. And by putting things togeth­er here we real­ly want these pub­li­ca­tions to work on their own, apart from sort of the online deliv­ery mod­el. That’s just how we’re get­ting the bits to you, but we real­ly think that the key to these being suc­cess­ful is hav­ing strong edi­to­r­i­al con­tent over time.

Malamud: Dale Dougherty, you men­tioned ads, you men­tioned mak­ing mon­ey. You’re a for-profit cor­po­ra­tion. How do you intend to make mon­ey off of an online mag­a­zine? I mean, tech­ni­cal­ly how can you know that?

Dougherty: Yeah. Well, a fourth pub­li­ca­tion which I did­n’t men­tion was the GNN mar­ket­place. So, that is where we’ve in some way seg­re­gat­ed the adver­tis­ing. We’ve looked at the pub­li­ca­tions here and said well, one way to do tech­ni­cal pub­li­ca­tions is to get a major­i­ty of your rev­enue from adver­tis­ing. And giv­en that we want­ed to grow this mar­ket, we real­ly want­ed to find who’s out there and how do you get them used to read­ing mag­a­zines. We did­n’t want to put a sub­scrip­tion fee, sub­scrip­tion charge, on the mag­a­zine itself. So we want­ed to explore ways to get oth­er kinds of fund­ing, and adver­tis­ing seemed like a suit­able way to do that. Most tech­ni­cal pub­li­ca­tions are you know, 80 to 90% sup­port­ed by adver­tis­ing any­way, even if they’re…

Malamud: Well but your adver­tis­ing is off to the side. When I read Computer World or Foo World or one of these things, I turn the page an d the ad hits me in the face. Are you doing that when I click on a mouse but­ton, does an ad come up unexpectedly?

Dougherty: Well, no. What we’ve done is sort of two forms of adver­tis­ing. One is the mar­ket­place in which it’s basi­cal­ly a resource direc­to­ry and you can put adver­tis­ing there. And then in the pub­li­ca­tions them­selves we real­ly just have what we call refer­rals. We put an icon for the adver­tis­er at the top of an arti­cle, or at the bot­tom we say you know ​“This arti­cle’s spon­sored by so-and-so” and it con­tains a link which can put them into the mar­ket­place and in into a par­tic­u­lar doc­u­ment that the adver­tis­er wants the read­er to see. 

But it is very much a choice-based adver­tis­ing sys­tem. And the point of it real­ly is tra­di­tion­al print adver­tis­ing has usu­al­ly an image and a punch­line that will get you some ini­tial atten­tion. But it ends up at the end say­ing call an 800 num­ber or send mail to this to get the full sto­ry. What we like to think we’re doing in GNN in terms of the adver­tis­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty is to give the full sto­ry to the read­er right there so that they have con­tent, infor­ma­tion about the prod­uct, real infor­ma­tion not just the tagline. But they have real infor­ma­tion about the prod­uct or ser­vice, and about the com­pa­ny. We encour­age the adver­tis­ers to put up arti­cles and things in that—we call those infor­ma­tion cen­ters or resource cen­ters. We real­ly think it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­mu­ni­cate with your cus­tomers or poten­tial cus­tomers about what you do.

Malamud: Well do the cus­tomers do that? Presumably you can track where peo­ple are going in your mag­a­zine. Do peo­ple look at the ads? More than once?

Dougherty: Yeah. We have track­ing, which means when so— We haven’t dis­cussed the tech­nol­o­gy, but gen­er­al­ly in a server-based sys­tem you come in and request some­thing of that serv­er, so it keeps a log of what’s gone on there. Right now it just keeps track that such an arti­cle was request­ed. And on look­ing at the four pub­li­ca­tions, we have say about 15% of the traf­fic is in the mar­ket­place. Which does­n’t make it is as big as the oth­er three pub­li­ca­tions just say on a mon—you know, this is about on six to eight weeks’ expe­ri­ence. But we will be able to know, from the log­ging. And that’s some­thing that tra­di­tion­al print adver­tis­ing cer­tain­ly can’t guar­an­tee you. They can guar­an­tee that so many peo­ple sub­scribe to that mag­a­zine, or pick it up at news­stands, but they can’t real­ly tell you whether peo­ple are actu­al­ly get­ting to that ad that you put in there.

Malamud: Are you being…too active here? Are you, by actu­al­ly watch­ing how the read­er reads, are you invad­ing his pri­va­cy? Is there such a thing as too active a magazine?

Dougherty: Mmm, it’s pos­si­ble that some peo­ple would have con­cerns over it. I real­ly think that what we’re doing is col­lec­tive sta­tis­tics. Nothing indi­vid­ual in terms of main­tain­ing… It just does­n’t have any mean­ing to us, and I think for con­cerns of pri­va­cy we cer­tain­ly would­n’t want to explore whether an indi­vid­ual read­er you know, likes this or that. But we do know you know, which…more…you’re look­ing for pat­terns. And we’re just start­ing off. You know, look through a com­pli­cat­ed log of data and say­ing that for peo­ple that go from the table of con­tents to the intro­duc­tion of an arti­cle, two thirds of those actu­al­ly con­tin­ue on to see the arti­cle itself. Things like that which tell you a bit about how you’re struc­tur­ing your infor­ma­tion. So I real­ly don’t feel like we are say­ing you know, ​“Joe in Kansas like this kind of stuff and we’re gonna give him more of it.” I do think that there are areas for online pub­lish­ing, how­ev­er, if we knew more about you we might be able to give you choic­es among the infor­ma­tion that would be mean­ing­ful to you. The tech­nol­o­gy isn’t there, but that’s something—

Malamud: Well let’s talk about the tech­nol­o­gy. What is your pub­lish­ing plat­form? What do you put your GNN togeth­er with?

Dougherty: Yeah. Well, GNN is a World Wide Web appli­ca­tion. Which basi­cal­ly means we’re using the spec­i­fi­ca­tions defined by the World Wide Web, and that’s some­thing that orig­i­nat­ed at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau are the main devel­op­ers of those spec­i­fi­ca­tions. In the United States of course, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Champaign, Illinois is the hotbed of web devel­op­ment. And what they’ve devel­oped there are real­ly pow­er­ful clients for Unix, PC, Windows, and Macintosh, as well as the serv­er side. 

Now, what is of sig­nif­i­cance to me in this client-server mod­el of the Web is that as a pub­lish­er we sim­ply run a serv­er. And we actu­al­ly run mul­ti­ple servers. We’ve put them in dif­fer­ent coun­tries and dif­fer­ent places where we think peo­ple can get are the infor­ma­tion fair­ly eas­i­ly. But the user choos­es the tool that they want to use, whether it’s Mosaic, or there’s anoth­er brows­er from University of Kansas called Lynx which is an ASCII-mode brows­er. And so, we’re giv­ing the user choic­es in terms of the func­tion­al­i­ty that they want in the brows­er, and there’s no rea­son not to assume that one day we’ll have com­mer­cial web browsers out there which have far more pow­er­ful inter­faces than what we have now. But the data that we’re send­ing across the net­work can remain con­stant or be part of the spec­i­fi­ca­tion. We don’t real­ly write to a par­tic­u­lar soft­ware pro­gram, we write to the specifications. 

Malamud: What about the Web made that the attrac­tive pub­lish­ing plat­form? Why aren’t you using WAIS, or why did­n’t you write your own server?

Dougherty: Well in fact we are using WAIS as well, but WAIS… To me the Web is a big step up from Gopher. And that’s prob­a­bly the major point. In the Web, we are able to dis­trib­ute doc­u­ments, in a sense, that have styled text and graph­ics, and even­tu­al­ly sound and video. But we are able to real­ly present a doc­u­ment mod­el. We’re able to cre­ate these pub­li­ca­tions, they don’t look like menu choic­es and things like that [crosstalk] as they do in Gopher.

Malamud: It’s not just plain ASCII—

Dougherty: Right.

Malamud: It’s not menus and ASCII text.

Dougherty: Right. It’s styled fonts. We’re able to spec­i­fy some­thing about the struc­ture of the infor­ma­tion and its rela­tion­ship from one doc­u­ment to anoth­er. So, it’s start­ing to look—at least from my point of view, it looked like the world I was famil­iar with in terms of pub­lish­ing, in terms of hav­ing doc­u­ments and mov­ing from one doc­u­ment to anoth­er. And so, as a pub­lish­er we just set up the struc­ture so that you can— You know, you have a table of con­tents, and you have the doc­u­ments you want to get to, and you set up a design for the whole pack­age. So I think it fit into the pub­lish­er’s needs. And that’s why we start­ed using it. It’s not the end of where we want to be, but it was cer­tain­ly a good place to start. The Web offers a nav­i­ga­tion­al mod­el based on hyper­text, or this idea of being able to link from one place to anoth­er. Most hyper­text pro­grams to date man­age their own name­space, which basi­cal­ly they define all those loca­tions and they resolve the address­es. What was unique about the Web was that it had real­ly a glob­al name­space for link address­ing, so that you could move from one doc­u­ment on one com­put­er to anoth­er doc­u­ment on anoth­er com­put­er, com­plete­ly trans­par­ent­ly. In fact—

Malamud: And so that’s the con­cept of the URL, right—

Dougherty: Right.

Malamud: The Universal Record Locator.

Dougherty: Right. And you know, it’s almost too trans­par­ent. I find—you know, when I’m giv­ing a demo some­times I want to stop, wave my hands and say, ​“Look, look. Do you real­ize you just went out to London, England to retrieve that list, or did you real­ize you just went over to Australia to get that doc­u­ment?” It just hap­pens trans­par­ent­ly in the system. 

But the Web offers a nav­i­ga­tion­al mod­el, and I think we real­ly need as well a search and retrieval mod­el, and that’s what WAIS offers. So in fact you’ll see that in GNN we have a WAIS serv­er run­ning as well as a web serv­er, so that you can type in a text string and get back a list of doc­u­ments that con­tain a cer­tain words.

Malamud: So what the user sees on this book inter­face of Mosaic or some oth­er view­er is a bunch of text and pic­tures, and some­place there’s ​“enter key­word to search for?”

Dougherty: Right. Or there are links in the doc­u­ment, which they can contain…you know, that’s how they move from one doc­u­ment to anoth­er either through the search mod­el or through the nav­i­ga­tion­al mod­el of hyperlinks.

Malamud: Dale Dougherty, the World Wide Web that you pub­lish in with GNN has hyper­text con­cepts, but it also has pub­lish­ing con­cepts. I know you’ve made an inten­sive study of SGML and you’re using an SGML vari­ant with­in the World Wide Web known as HTML. Could you tell us a lit­tle bit about how SGML and this World Wide Web vari­ant relate to each oth­er? Is this the same SGML we’ve heard talked about for the last ten or fif­teen years by the pub­lish­ing community?

Dougherty: Well HTML is best viewed as a min­i­mal sub­set of SGML. SGML itself is…it’s like a spec­i­fi­ca­tion for a lan­guage, and then you end up with— You know, what you end up actu­al­ly work­ing with is a lan­guage itself that you go in and you define it. So HTML is a lim­it­ed lan­guage that allows us to define doc­u­ments for pur­pos­es of dis­tri­b­u­tion. We actu­al­ly at O’Reilly keep the doc­u­ment in a more rich ver­sion of SGML, if you will, and we fil­ter down into HTML.

Malamud: What do you lose? What’re some of the things you have inter­nal­ly that you can’t pub­lish with?

Dougherty: Well, it’s not so much that we lose, we just don’t need them in the online ver­sion. We might be keeping—for instance the Whole Internet Catalog online, we have con­tact infor­ma­tion, or we have an update his­to­ry. You view it more as a data­base of infor­ma­tion, and then there’s only some of this infor­ma­tion that you want to pub­lish in a par­tic­u­lar medium.

Malamud: Okay, so that’s con­tent that you’re not using. Are there styl­is­tic indi­ca­tions, are there tricks you do on paper that you can’t do on the Web? You know, switch to ital­ic, pull in a Greek char­ac­ter, cen­ter the fol­low­ing text.

Dougherty: Well there are lots of lim­i­ta­tions cer­tain­ly in the ren­der­ing on the Web. We can’t do two columns, for instance. We can’t do…you know, if you put up a graph­ic you basi­cal­ly lose all the hor­i­zon­tal space on that area unless you put up oth­er graph­ics with it. So there are def­i­nite­ly prob­lems there, or should we would say it’s not very rich, you know, when you look at say what you can do on a print­ed page. But that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly an SGML prob­lem, that’s sim­ply we can iden­ti­fy the key ele­ments in the doc­u­ment, and what we have are dif­fer­ent browsers mak­ing ren­der­ing deci­sions out there that some make good ones, some make bad ones. Some will take the title of the doc­u­ment and put it right-justified at the top of a page, oth­ers will cen­ter it, and oth­ers will put it as part of the appli­ca­tion infor­ma­tion and it’s almost invis­i­ble. So there are dif­fer­ent choic­es that browsers are mak­ing with it. 

But in terms of— You know, get­ting back to the SGML, it’s some­thing that’s impor­tant— We’re find­ing out— We’re try­ing to sor­ta lob­by with­in the web com­mu­ni­ties to real­ly try to respect the data spec­i­fi­ca­tion here. If you author a doc­u­ment and all you do is pull up Mosaic and can look at it and say that looks fine on the screen, even­tu­al­ly that’s gonna hurt you or hurt the Web, I think, if we are so locked into a par­tic­u­lar brows­er. What SGML is try­ing to say is here’s a com­mon under­stand­ing of the struc­ture of a doc­u­ment so that all browsers can process at least the struc­ture the same way. 

Malamud: So SGML is about the fact that this text is a title, not about the fact that titles are right or cen­tered or left or a cer­tain font or color.

Dougherty: Exactly. Something like a stylesheet mech­a­nism is need­ed in the Web and is some­thing we’re try­ing to devel­op to specify—to map the for­mat­ting instruc­tions to the struc­tur­al ele­ments, such as map­ping Helvetica Bold to fact that this is a title

Malamud: Dale Dougherty, you’re actu­al­ly run­ning a busi­ness on the Internet. We’ve been hear­ing for years about pub­lish­ers. And they’ve been look­ing at SGML, they’ve been look­ing at online pub­lish­ing, and they’re get­ting ready to go. Are the McGraw Hills and the Addison Wesleys, are those com­pa­nies going to be the pub­lish­ers on the Internet? Are they going to get on there? Or are you going to be the next McGraw hill? Are you eat­ing their lunch, or are they about to step on top of you?

Dougherty: Well… One can’t real­ly know that at this point. I think based on activ­i­ty…you know, as a small pub­lish­er we’re doing a lot more than some of the larg­er com­pa­nies out there. We think it’s very impor­tant to be involved right now when things like even the Web are emerg­ing as impor­tant appli­ca­tion frame­works. It’s impor­tant to have the input into the spec­i­fi­ca­tions that are being devel­oped. It won’t be so easy to change some of these things a cou­ple years hence. 

My sense is the pub­lish­ers don’t real­ly want a close rela­tion­ship to tech­nol­o­gy these days, and they don’t want to have their hands in it. And that’s the only way, I think, right now that you can get into online pub­lish­ing via the Internet, is to go in and solve the prob­lems your­self as much as you can and work with oth­ers coop­er­a­tive­ly. It’s sort of unfor­tu­nate, because we’ve tried to work with oth­er pub­lish­ers I think in a way to encour­age a view that this pub­lish­ing tech­nol­o­gy ought to be some­thing we share, by and large, and we com­pete based on the con­tent. In oth­er words what we’re actu­al­ly deliv­er­ing. But it’s in all of our inter­ests to have browsers like Mosaic out there. To have an appli­ca­tion frame­work in which the infor­ma­tion pass­es trans­par­ent­ly from one user to anoth­er in terms of the type of sys­tem that they’re using. If you look at this online pub­lish­ing as an envi­ron­ment, they choose their own tools and it’s our job to deliv­er into that envi­ron­ment suc­cess­ful­ly. We don’t require them to have the piece of pro­pri­etary soft­ware that we licensed from so-and-so. What I real­ly see in the CD-ROM mar­ket is where you’ve frag­ment­ed that mar­ket because each CD-ROM comes with its own front end soft­ware, and there’s only so many pieces of soft­ware as a user that you want to learn. And if you can’t use the same piece of soft­ware to read an ency­clo­pe­dia as you can a dic­tio­nary as you can a biol­o­gy ref­er­ence man­u­al, you know, you’re gonna stop using that envi­ron­ment. So we real­ly think that the strength of some­thing like the Web is that infor­ma­tion can be ubiq­ui­tous in there. You can get it through lots of dif­fer­ent ways. The more pub­lish­ers that are on the Internet the bet­ter for all of us, and I real­ly mean that’s bet­ter for the users, it’s bet­ter for the pub­lish­ers. The rich­er the infor­ma­tion space, the more peo­ple you’ll have in it.

Malamud: Do you think you’re going to get those oth­er pub­lish­ers online? The old­er main­stream pub­lish­ers. Are they gonna join this world? ​‘Cause you know, when they first start­ed they were tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies. When pub­lish­ers first start­ed, the cur­rent big com­pa­nies, the McGraw Hills, were mas­ters at run­ning large print­ing press­es and doing dis­tri­b­u­tion of large vol­umes of papers to lots and lots of book­stores. They were tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies. Are they going to be able to make this shift into the next technology?

Dougherty: Well I think they should be able to. It’s not clear, because this isn’t just a tech­nol­o­gy oppor­tu­ni­ty, it’s also a mar­ket­ing and sales oppor­tu­ni­ty. And that’s anoth­er thing that pub­lish­ers should be fair­ly strong at doing. But you know, this is not only an oppor­tu­ni­ty to deliv­er your books online, but it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reach the peo­ple who want to buy them in the first place. So it real­ly is a com­plete chan­nel. And I think it requires not just…you know, what you see too much is pub­lish­ers spend a fair amount of mon­ey doing a pilot project that pro­duces a one-off…you know, one exam­ple of a prod­uct at the end. And they put that out and they put it in the book­stores. And you know, they end up sell­ing a thou­sand of the thing. And they say ​“Well, we tried elec­tron­ic pub­lish­ing, it just did­n’t work and we’ve retreat­ed from it.” I think you need a dif­fer­ent view of what elec­tron­ic pub­lish­ing is to make this work, and I think it involves some invest­ment, it involves get­ting in and decid­ing how is this thing going to work ​’cause it has to work. It’s just a mat­ter of get­ting in there and fig­ur­ing out what are the pieces that have to come togeth­er to make it work. I don’t think the idea of send­ing some­thing off to a third par­ty, hav­ing them put it on CD-ROM for you and giv­ing you a prod­uct back which then you have to mar­ket and sell through tra­di­tion­al chan­nels is real­ly the way to break open this market. 

Malamud: Gotta do it yourself.

Dougherty: Gotta do it yourself—

Malamud: DIY, as Peter Gabriel says.

Dougherty: Yeah. [laughs]

Malamud: Well thank you very much. We’ve been talk­ing to Dale Dougherty, the pub­lish­er of Global Network Navigator. Thanks for being a Geek of the Week.

Dougherty: Thank you, Carl. 

Malamud: You’ve been lis­ten­ing to Geek of the Week, a pro­duc­tion of the Internet Multicasting Service. To pur­chase an audio cas­sette of this pro­gram, send mail to audio@​ora.​com. You may copy this file and change the encod­ing for­mat, but may not resell the con­tents or make a deriv­a­tive work.

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This is Carl Malamud for the Internet Multicasting Service, town crier to the glob­al village.