What's the point of delivering information to the home computer if you don't take full advantage of the power of the machine? That's a rhetorical question.
Granted, multi-helpered browsers and Javazzed-up logos and "ticker crawls" and server-push animations start to do a little more with the interface than PUNT (plain underutilized newspaper text, similar to POTS, or plain old telephone service). And this prettified, lovely, engaging interface is using computer power to be that nice.
But, like the glitzy images and image-maps, they clog the bandwith to very little useful effect--often. And, equally often, it seems, when an image would be just perfect (a locator map, for instance), we're supplied with an instruction list or a paragraph of descriptive text.
Yes, all of this is in its infancy.
Yes, we're all experimenting.
However, I submit that it's still part of the one-to-many pattern (and, yes, I'm as guilty of fitting that mold with this incipient web-site as the next publisher/broadcaster/web-siter, but I'm interested in creating a place for dialog).
What I've been working on for the past eight years is building tools that would use volatile information--also known sometimes as "news"--in a powerful, private and personal way, with the help of computers--the home information appliance. Now, it could that this information would be used to aid and abet better betting--better stock-market betting, better horse-race and sports betting, better card-game and lottery-betting, all of that.
But what if, instead, the information and software to use it helped save time, educate, simplify, manage things in people's private lives?
A simple example: Magazine X and Newspaper Y, from time to time, do personal finance stories about how best to invest for a young child's eventual college education, say (unless they drop out to found a computer software company, and then it can be their first infusion of capital). Typically, the publication will offer a few charts with examples of various sorts--a couple of actual families and their experiences, or a "small-," "medium-" and "large-sized" portfolio. Odds are that not one of those examples fits the circumstances of any reader--they just fit the example.
What if the editorial effort supplied charts with a blank column in those tables--for the subscriber to enter his or her own circumstances, in such a way that the results would be completely relevant? And of course the next step would perhaps be to actually act on some of the decisions made in that private, powerful and personal way.
I assert that there are ways in which both volatile and static information, combined with computer applications, can be packaged, sold and used beneficially for virtually every area of human endeavor.
So, let's go to the kitchen to look at an example.