Web's Eye View on the Web
Just a note that this and future issues will be available
from MCLI at:

   http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/eye/
   
Look for more changes... less a shopping list of URLs and
more commentary, speculation, and highlighting of creative
web uses in and around the District.

Hello MCC!
If you've not been there recently, take a look at Mesa
Community College's web site:

   http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/
   
which does a nice job of organizing college information into
logical categories and makes good use of some short cuts via
pop-up menus from the front page.

Maricopa Crawler
There is a electronic critter "walking" all the Maricopa
webs- developed by Eric Johnson and others in District ITS,
this allows you to keyword search for *any* web document
with a .maricopa.edu as part of its URL. Its fast and the
results are similar in style to Alta Vista or Lycos. Try it
for yourself at:

   http://www.maricopa.edu/search/websearch.html
   
It's easy enough to plug the HTML for the search form and
put it into web pages at other sites- for example, we've
added it to the MCLI page that has a clickable map of the
District:

   http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mcccd/
   
MCLI Gets "Web Review" News Feed
We were told that we were bestowed a great honor. Songline
Studios, a divison of the big kahuna publishers O'Reilley
and Associates, is responsible for one of the great online
web magazines- Web Review:

   http://webreview.com/
   
that features commentary on technology and the web, lots of
great tech tips, and other trendy stuff. Every day they
email the MCLI web server a index of the headline stories,
which are hypertext linked to the articles from their site.

The Web Review daily headlines are available from MCLI at:

   http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/newsfeed.html
   
The Myth of Cataloging
This month's issue of Wired (http://www.wired.com/) has a
feature article "Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe)"

   http://www.wired.com/4.05/indexing/

that does a nice job of reviewing the state of the web in
terms of efforts to catalog it, from Yahoo to Excite and
more. It's less about what these are and more about what
they do, cannot do, all framed in the historical perspective
of past efforts to classify all knowledge (all which
succumbed to the weight of the task).

Under a Biblical proportional flood of URLs, I am starting
to conclude that it is insane to try to organize and
maintain "lists of sites". It will only get worse (the
chore) as it gets better (even more increases in content
OTW- On The Web). Although we are pleased with how well our
searchable/open submission web areas work:

  451 F Links
     http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/451f/
     
  Teaching and Learning on the WWW
     http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tl/

it is not reasonable to try to claim that these are the
"best".

It makes more sense to become familiar with the web search
tools, and Digital's Altavista is emerging in my book as the
big player:

   http://altavista.digital.com/
   
Anyone can type in a bunch of keywords and click search- but
you can call yourself a "Super Sleuth" if you begin to uses
the "power options". I could sit here and write some
examples. but they have done a nice job if you look at the
information and examples under the "Help" and "Advanced
Query" buttons on the Alta Vista page.

If you try web searches and tell me that they just return to
much extraneous information I will ask if you used the
logical and pattern options.

Mile Long Net Addresses
We've all seen some long URLs in our time, but has anyone
noticed how some new sites have very long names just for
their Internet address? Maybe the number of available and
interesting short names are disappearing? If I were a 
company, I would sure want something short and sweet to
type in by hand...

Here are some real examples. Counting everything between the
slashes:

(20 chars)    http://www.runnersworld.com/
(23 chars)    http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/
(26 chars)    http://www.deathofcompetition.com/

Does anyone know a longer one?

How long until:

    http://www.harryswideworldofslightlydamagedusedfurniture.com/
    

Who remembers the show "Name That Tune?"
    
   "I can name that URL in 7 characters!"

   "Name that URL!"

    The shortest I have seen (can anyone top this?) belongs 
    to Global Network Navigator.
        http://gnn.com/