News —— Most large news agencies have online counterparts. You can often read their news online before it appears in print. This is the case with news from sources like NTB, Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Kyodo News Report (Japan), Reuters, Xinhua English Language News Service (China) and TASS. Some news is only made available in electronic form. News may be read in several ways, depending on what online service you use: * From a list of headlines. Enter a story's number to receive its full text. The news may be split up into groups, like Sports, International news, Business, and Entertainment. * Some services let you hook directly into a news agency's 'feed line' to get news as it is being made available. At 11.02, 11.04, 11.15, etc. * News may be 'clipped' and stored in your mailbox twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Clipping services search articles for occurrences of your personal keyword phrases while you're offline. In this way, you can monitor new products, companies, people, and countries, even when you're not online. NewsFlash is NewsNet's electronic clipping service, a powerful resource that lets you monitor NewsNet's newsletters for topics of interest. On the Executive News Service (CompuServe), you can search for words in story headlines. You can also search for first three lines of text from 8,000 stories/day from Washington Post, OTC NewsAlert, Associated Press, United Press International and Reuters Financial News Wire. Newspapers used to receive news through the wires before the online user. This built-in delay has now been removed on many services. Industry and professional news is usually available online long before it appears in print.
Databases ————- Some years ago, most databases just contained references to articles, books and other written or electronic sources of information. The typical search result looked like this:
0019201 02-88-68
TRIMETHOPRIM-SULFAMETHOXAZOLE in CYST Fluid from Autosomal
Dominant POLYCYSTIC KIDNEYS.
Elzinga L.W.; et al. W.M. Bennett, Dept. of Med., Oregon Hlth.
Sci. Univ., 3101 Southwest Sam Jackson Park Rd., Portland,
OR 97201.
Kid. Int. 32: 884-888. Dec. 1987
Subfile: Internal Medicine; Family Practice; Nephrology;
Infectious Disease; Clinical Pharmacology; Highlights of General
Medicine
You had to take the reference to a library to get a print copy of the article. Some services let you to order a copy while online, to be sent you by mail from a copying service. Full-text searching is now the rule. When you find an article of interest, you can have the full text displayed on your screen at once (normally without accompanying pictures and tables, though). The search commands are simpler and more powerful.
Just for fun —————— Many online services focus on your leisure time. They offer reviews and news about movies, video, music, and sport. There are forums for stamp and coin collectors, travel maniacs, passionate cooks, wine tasters, and other special interest groups. Besides, many services are entertaining in themselves. Large, complex adventure games, where hundreds of users can play simultaneously, are popular choices. People sit glued to the computer screen for hours. 'Chat', this keyboard-to-keyboard contact-phone type of simultaneous conversation between from two and up to hundreds of persons, is also popular. It works like a combination of a social activity and a role-playing/strategy/fantasy/skill-improving game. Shopping is the online equivalent of traditional mail order business. The difference is that you can buy while browsing. Some commercial services distribute colorful catalogues to users to support sales. Some distribute pictures of the merchandise by modem. You can buy anything from racer fitness equipment and diamonds to cars. Enter your credit card number and the Chevrolet is yours. The online mail order business is becoming increasingly global.
Level 5: The user interface —————————————- This term describes how the online service is presented to you, that is, in what form text, pictures and sound appear on your personal communications computer. Most online services offer the first three of these four levels. Some offer more:
1. Menus for novices. The user can select (navigate) by
pressing a figure or a letter.
2. Short menus or lists of commands for the intermediate user.
The user knows some about how the service works, and just
wants a short reminder to help navigate.
3. A short prompt (often just a character, like a "!"), which
tells the expert user where he is in the system right now.
Those knowing the service inside out, don't need reminders
about what word or command to enter at this point.
4. Some services offer automatic access without any menus or
visible prompts at all. Everything happens in a two-way
stream of unintelligent data. The only menus that the user
sees, are those belonging to the program running on his
personal computer.
Some services emphasize colors, graphics and sound. They may require that users have certain hardware or special add-on cards in their communications computer. Often, a special communications program is also needed. Other services use methods for presenting colors and graphics already built into their users' computers (and programs). Colors, graphics and sound are highly desirable in some applications, like online games and weather forecasts. But even where it is not important, there will always be many wanting it. To the professional on a fact-gathering mission, these features may give slower data transfer and problems when saving text to disk for later use. Therefore, many prefer ASCII text with no extras. Sports cars are nice, but for delivering furniture they're seldom any good. The same applies to the user interfaces. No one is perfect for all applications.