Murray added in August 1999: "In addition to 'web-extending' books, we are now web-extending our multimedia (CD-ROM) products — to update and enrich them." A few months later, he added: "Our company — EDVantage Software — has become an internet company instead of a multimedia (CD-ROM) company. We deliver educational material online to students and teachers."
= Hypermedia Writing
In 1999, Jean-Paul, an hypermedia author, was the webmaster of cotres.net, a site telling stories in 3D. He really enjoyed the freedom given by online publishing. He wrote in August 1999: "The internet allows me to do without intermediaries, such as record companies, publishers and distributors. Most of all, it allows me to crystallize what I have in my head: the print medium (desktop-publishing, in fact) only allows me to partly do that. Then the intermediaries will take over and I will have to look somewhere else, a place where the grass is greener…"
Jean-Paul added in June 2000: "Surfing the web is like radiating in all directions (I am interested in something and I click on all the links on a home page) or like jumping around (from one click to another, as the links appear). You can do this in the print media, of course. But the difference is striking. So the internet didn't change my life, but it did change how I write. You don't write the same way for a website as you do for a script or a play.
But it wasn't exactly the internet that changed my writing, it was the first model of the Mac. I discovered it when I was teaching myself Hypercard. I still remember how astonished I was during my month of learning about buttons and links and about surfing by association, objects and images. Being able, by just clicking on part of the screen, to open piles of cards, with each card offering new buttons and each button opening onto a new series of them. In short, learning everything about the web that today seems really routine was a revelation for me. I hear Steve Jobs and his team had the same kind of shock when they discovered the forerunner of the Mac in the labs of Rank Xerox.
Since then I have been writing directly on the screen. I use a paper print-out only occasionally, to help me fix up an article, or to give somebody who doesn't like screens a rough idea, something immediate. It is only an approximation, because print forces us into a linear relationship: the words scroll out page by page most of the time. But when you have links, you have a different relationship to time and space in your imagination. And for me, it is a great opportunity to use this reading/writing interplay, whereas leafing through a book gives only a suggestion of it — a vague one because a book is not meant for that."
2000: YOURDICTIONARY.COM
[Overview]
After founding A Web of Online Dictionaries (WOD) in 1995, Robert Beard included it in a larger project, yourDictionary.com, that he cofounded in early 2000. He wrote in January 2000: "The new website is an index of 1,200+ dictionaries in more than 200 languages. Besides the WOD, the new website includes a word-of-the-day-feature, word games, a language chat room, the old Web of On-line Grammars (now expanded to include additional language resources), the Web of Linguistic Fun, multilingual dictionaries; specialized English dictionaries; thesauri and other vocabulary aids; language identifiers and guessers, and other features; dictionary indices. yourDictionary.com will hopefully be the premiere language portal and the largest language resource site on the web. It is now actively acquiring dictionaries and grammars of all languages with a particular focus on endangered languages. It is overseen by a blue ribbon panel of linguistic experts from all over the world."
[In Depth (published in 2001)]