Tales from the Terminal Room

June 2000 Issue No.11

Archives

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Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications.

In this issue:

• Portals Galore
• New and updated sites added to RBA's Business Sources on the Net
• These things are sent to try us!
  • Cannot display page - page empty or site does not exist
• Gizmo of the Month
  • A4 Proxy - Anonymizer for Web surfing

Portals Galore

On May 24th and 25th, the Online Information for the City show was held at the Baltic Exchange in London. Major information providers in this field such as Bureau van Dijk, Data Downlink and Thomson were there but the emphasis was more on how that information is presented and delivered to users, so also present were several companies who provide gateways and portals, for example Autonomy, Investhink, Portal B. As well as the exhibition, there were free seminars, organized by TFPL, on the practicalities of using business information and portals. A couple of weeks later, TFPL ran the first of two full day seminars on portals.

Portals are *the* in-thing and everyone has to be seen to be doing something with them, but there is confusion in some people's minds over what a portal really is. The subject has been so dramatically hyped and surrounded with so much technical wizardry that the prime function of a portal has, in some cases, been forgotten.

What is a Portal?

My Oxford English Dictionary says:

"Doorway, gateway, esp. elaborate one"

(Far too many portal designers have taken the "elaborate" part of that definition to heart!)

The FAQ on BC IntraView's Web site (one of the companies at Online Information for the City) says that

"A knowledge portal allows an organization to present each user with a view of relevant content that is available to them. It acts as a presentation layer over content that has been previously created" (http://www.bcnintraview.com/)

Thus a portal can cover a multitude of sins:

• Site listings with or without other services such as email, ecommerce, possibly customisable
• Online services such as Lexis-Nexis, Dialog that pull together databases from different publishers and provide access through a single interface
• Services that provide a unified interface to multiple sources across the Web
• Evaluated listings
• Narrowly focused Services that target specific business or industry sectors and types of information.
• Fully customisable services

The most important feature of portal for me is that it should help the user identify relevant sources and take them to the right information quickly and effectively. Some of the services that were discussed at the online information show and TFPL seminar are summarised below:

Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.co.uk/)
Originally just a Web directory but now offering access to company financials, share prices, news, weather etc. An under-utilised feature is My Yahoo that enables the user to customise both the layout and the content that is presented to them. Yahoo is one of the most popular starting points for accessing Web based resources. This is due not only to the quality of its content but also to its stable and simple structure. From one visit to the next, you know roughly where the links you'll need will be on the screen. There may well be sophisticated technology underlying the service but it never gets in the way. (The issue of accessibility or rather *non-accessibility* caused by overuse of non-essential technology was a complaint frequently voiced by delegates at both events).

Northern Light (http://www.nlsearch.com/ or http://www.nlresearch.com/)
Having started out as a search engine for free Web sites, Northern Light now includes priced content such as trade and industry journals, brokers reports and market research. It is not generally thought of as a portal but I think it merits the description because of the way it aggregates content from multiple publishers in much the same way as the traditional online hosts. Many organisations use Northern Light to supplement or even to replace one or more of their subscription services. If you cannot predict how often you are likely to use a source, then Northern Light's pay-as-you-go fees are more attractive than the huge, up-front, annual subscriptions demanded by the larger information providers.

Bureau van Dijk (http://www.bvdsuite.com/)
Well known for their financial and directory CDs, BvD now offer a single point of access (portal?) to a suite of their company financial products. Registered users can access any combination of the databases using a credit account or an unlimited one year subscription. If you want to give it a whirl, you can register for 200 free credits.

FT.com (http://www.ft.com/)
FT.com was recently re-launched as a portal rather than just a news service. It was mentioned at both events but many people confessed to still using it purely for news articles. This is partly out of habit but several commented that the front page is far too "busy" and access can be diabolically slow. Shows promise but it is still thought of as The Financial Times Online.

Evaluated listings
Sites that simply list links to other sites on a particular subject do fall within the broader definitions of a portal, but I always feel that evaluated listings - where some comment or analysis of the sites in question are given - are more reassuring and deserving of the term. There are so many of these that one cannot list them all but those that were repeatedly mentioned included:

Corporate Information (http://www.corporateinformation.com/)
Exportall (http://www.exportall.com/)
BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/)
Telephone directories on the Web (http://www.teldir.com/)
Governments on the Web (http://www.gksoft.com/govt/)
Delia Venables Legal Links (http://www.venables.co.uk/)

Investhink (http://www.investhink.com/)
Investhink covers financial and investment sources, both free and subscription based. There are several options for searching: keyword search, a search wizard that guides you through a series of steps to narrow down your search, and category searching. I find the Search Wizard to be very good: it enables you to restrict your search by type of information, geographical coverage, and priced or free services. The results list can be ordered alphabetically, by relevance or usage and displays brief descriptions of each service. The Product Profile button gives you detailed information about the content of the site and from here you can add it to the bookmark in your Investhink Toolbox. It is customisable so you can add "bookmarks" of sites, product requests and saved searches to your "Toolbox" (you have to register in order to make use of this feature).

Portal B (http://www.portalb.com/)
For those of us brought up on a diet of databases of independently assessed and indexed, quality resources, the Web is a nightmare. Too much information; difficult to find; and time consuming to evaluate. Wouldn't it be nice if someone would identify, evaluate and index both free and subscription Web sources? Portal B - part of Data Downlink - aims to do just that. Portal B currently has a database of more than 10,000 Web sites, selected and indexed by business information professionals. There are abstracts and keywords assigned to each Web site and the service also offers the option of subscribing to the premium databases available through the .xls service. So what's the catch? Answer: a hefty annual subscription but if you want to put it through its paces, you can apply for a free trial.

Vrisko (http://www.vrisko.com/)
So you've spent months locating and evaluating online resources. You've set up a neat little series of pages with links to the key sites on your Intranet and called it a portal BUT.... Your users still aren't sure of where to go, and when they do take the plunge they find the sites impossible to navigate. This is where products from companies such as Vrisko come in.

Vrisko can design a portal to meet your needs exactly: you can integrate Intranet with Internet content and free sites with subscription services. The demonstration on the Vrisko site gives you an idea of how far a portal can go in delivering information in a user friendly manner. Most portals dump you at the home page of a linked Web site and from there you are on your own. The approach that Vrisko adopts is to build in the necessary navigational links and advanced search strategies so that there is virtually no opportunity for the user to get lost or side-tracked. You have total control over the content and usage. And the cost of this control? Answer: How long is a piece of string? It all depends on what you want included and how.

Conclusion

Are Portals a good thing? In general - Yes. They provide excellent starting points for research and can save you valuable time in identifying and evaluating sources. Nevertheless, they are by nature selective and you will, at some point, have to expand your information gathering strategies to include general Web search tools. If you opt for a fully customisable system that sits on your Intranet you will have to spend time analysing your users real needs and identifying appropriate resources. If you are using ready-made external services, beware of over-reliance on a single portal. Maintain your own list of key sites because portals, like ordinary Web sites, can and do disappear overnight without trace.

Information Resources

The Miscellaneous section (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/misc.htm) contains a new section on biographies:

xRefer (http://www.xrefer.com/)
This free-to-use portal includes more than 100,000 individual factual entries from "19 high-quality reference titles freely available on the Web". The site says that this will provide Web users with "the most authoritative and comprehensive factual information site seen on the Internet to date". Content providers currently include Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press, Macmillan and Penguin who are offering a variety of encyclopaedia, dictionaries, thesaurus, books of quotations and the Who's Who in the Twentieth Century. I found the biographies too short and succinct but at least one can assume with a high degree of confidence that they are accurate. Depending on the source the biography may be just a paragraph, as was the case with my search on John Donne, but you do also get links to quotations and any other available reference material.

Biography Center (http://www.biography-center.com/)
This site claims to have "10666 biographies, 5347 in English". Others are in French, Spanish, and German. It is essentially a collection of links to pages on approximately 140 Web sites (details are available on the Biography Center) and they range from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at St Andrews University in Scotland, the Nobel Foundation, through to free sites on services such as Tripod, Angelfire and Geocities It has a much wider selection of sources and lengthier biographies than xRefer but I did wonder about the quality of some of them. One of the sites about John Donne starts with: "First of all, I must admit that I don't much care for John's poems. But he's important to know--after all, he was the leader, so to speak, of the metaphysical school of poetry and by all accounts, a nice guy." I may not like the writer's style but I did find the information to be accurate so I assume that there is some form of quality control over what is accepted by the Center.

FT People (http://www.ft.com/)
From the FT home page, follow the link to the Business Directory (near the bottom of the page) and then to the People section. There are around 650 "dossiers" but it is a somewhat eclectic collection. Fidel Castro is there but I could not see any UK politicians, and a large number of well known business people are absent. It is not clear how people are selected for inclusion or where the basic information - called "Vital Signs" - comes from. You can browse by company or surname of the individual, or search on a keyword. "Vital Signs" gives you a name, photograph, title, age, education, salary (usually given as n/a!), claim to fame, quotable quotes and a section called "Etc". There are external links that vary depending on the person in question but they include links to personal and corporate Web sites, other profiles (for example Time Digital Profiles), major articles and latest news.

Country Specific Information (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/country.htm)

Ernst & Young's Doing Business In (http://www.doingbusinessin.com/)
Guides for countries world-wide with sections on "Doing Business In", "Corporate Tax", "Executive Tax", and "Executive Immigration".

Deloitte & Touche Country Guide (http://www.tax.deloitte.com/)
Quick Guides to Taxation providing brief overviews of the tax systems and doing business in 82 countries (in PDF format). They can be found either by looking at the Site Map or in the News section.

ebusiness Forum(http://www.ebusinessforum.com/)
(Also listed in the Market Research & Statistics section)
Produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), this site looks at the commercial, regulatory and legal issues affecting ebusiness in approximately 60 countries. There are macroeconomic snapshots, relevant Internet statistics, news and popular sites for each country. Free of charge with links to EIU priced services.

Market Research & Statistics (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stats.htm)

The UK Official National Statistics (ONS) site has moved to "National Statistics - the official UK statistics site" at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/. It has undergone a full makeover and, although many of the statistics are now easier to find, the useful page with links to other national, official statistical sites has gone.

News Sources (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/news.htm)

eFinancial News (http://www.efinancialnews.com/)
This is the Internet version of the weekly newspaper for the European securities industry, plus a daily press digest of syndicated articles from Wall Street Journal Europe, Financial Times and other UK broadsheets. There is an emailed daily news service and a searchable archive going back to October 1998. The service is currently free of charge but you have to register if you want to access all of the content. I signed up for the daily newsletter and am impressed so far. There is not too much information - just enough to work out if the articles are of interest and hypertext links that take you straight to the story. It makes a pleasant change to see a quality European biased news service in this sector.

These things are sent to try us!

Cannot display page - page empty or site does not exist

The "desktop" of my main Internet machine is choc-a-bloc with shortcuts to Dial-up Networking connections: CIX, CIX toll-free, Red Hot Ant, Demon, IC24, Hemmington Scott Net, Waitrose.com, Freeserve to name but a few. I use only two or three on a regular basis, the rest being there as backups or for quite specific reasons. Hemscott.net, for example, gives me free access to UK company information that is not available on the general Hemscott site.

My main ISP is CIX and all my email, Usenet and Web hosting is through them. Until recently, CIX did not offer toll free (unmetered) access to their service so I also have Red Hot Ant (RHA), which I use throughout the day for surfing the Web, downloading my mail and Usenet and discussion groups. The other ISPs are backups in case CIX or RHA crash.

CIX is generally very reliable. In fact it has been rated top ISP in a number of Internet magazine performance tables. So it came as a shock when I discovered one morning that I could not download anything from CIX using RHA. Neither could I ftp to my Web site using RHA. What was even worse was that my Web site appeared to be "down" as did other CIX hosted sites. That well known, so called "friendly" error message kept popping up: Cannot display page .. etc. etc.

A couple of hours down time is one thing but when it went on all morning and for the best part of an afternoon I started to panic. One of the excellent features of CIX is that, like AOL and CompuServe, it has member-only conferences that are totally separate from the Internet and can be accessed via independent dial-up. Off I went into the support conferences where I found others who were having exactly the same problems. But there were also an equal number of people who were having a normal day on the Internet. Furthermore, IT support could not see anything wrong with the system from their end.

After comparing notes, the severely disgruntled amongst us worked out that the common factor was Red Hot Ant. Was CIX blocking RHA users? This seemed to be confirmed when a couple of RHA users who were using an anonymizer called A4 Proxy* (see Gizmo of the month below) said that they were connecting without any difficulty. This theory was scuppered when two people put up their cyber hands and said that they had connection difficulties but were using completely different ISPs.

Light began to dawn when one participant discovered that INS, who are the main backbone provider for CIX, were having serious problems with a router in the London area. A quick check on the INS status page (http://www1.insnet.net/) confirmed this as did the trace routes from RHA to CIX: data was not getting past the entry point into the INS network. (For more information on trace route, see Gizmo of the Month in the January 2000 issue, No 6.)

It was not that simple though. Once the INSnet fault had been rectified traffic was still not getting through on the RHA/CIX route. To summarise: we eventually learned that there had also been a fault on UUnet who are backbone providers to RHA, as well as to a large number of major commercial Web sites and corporate networks! The routers on either side of the UUnet and INS networks were not on speaking terms, so Web sites and services supported by them were invisible to each other. At least we now knew what was going on.

But why make such a song and dance about the incident - we all know that the Internet is erratic and unreliable. The issue here was that a significant number of Web sites disappeared off the face of the Internet and The Powers That Be (TPTB) were oblivious to the problem. All the poor user got was that irritating, uninformative error message. Because it all depended on who hosted the sites and where the visitors to those sites were coming from, TPTB ignored the rantings of a vocal minority and assumed it was just a bad day on the Net. If the RHA/CIX contingent had not been so vociferous and downright awkward, the situation might have continued for a week instead of two days. With today's emphasis on the Web and eCommerce that is not good news.

I am currently Chair of UKOLUG (UK Online User Group) and the UKOLUG Web site is hosted on CIX. We have a conference in a week's time and I know from past experience that there will be the inevitable late bookings and delegates trying to confirm arrangements. Most of this is done through email and the Web site and we soon realised that not everyone was getting through. A few people thought it strange that they could not access the Web site and, suspecting that their emails had failed, faxed or rang the office. Goodness knows how many didn't and are still waiting for us to reply.

So what can one do about it. From the technology point of view, "Not a lot" :-( We are all being exhorted to make more use of the Internet but it keels over with alarming regularity. And when it does, you can't pin an explanatory note to your Web "front door" if a) the address of that front door has disappeared, albeit temporarily, from the cyber maps and b) you are unaware of the problem.

If you are a supplier on the Net all you can do is make sure that your customers have alternative means of contacting you. If you are a user, keep a record of all the contact details for your suppliers - email, telephone, fax, physical address. Over-reliance on one form of communication is foolhardy, especially when it is the Internet.

Footnote. *This was because the A4 Proxy program was taking people via completely different networks and by-passing the block.

Gizmo of the Month

Anonymity 4 Proxy

In the UK, unmetered Internet access where you pay a fixed fee for unlimited access has only just taken off. One of the newer companies to enter this market is Red Hot Ant (RHA) and for a total annual subscription of GBP 50 I can use the Internet as much as I like at any time of day, any day of the week.

For me, the service works well as I use it primarily during the working day and not during the evening, which is when most of these types of service suffer heavy congestion. A major drawback of RHA at any time of day, though, is that you cannot directly access JANET and UK government sites. The story currently circulating is that an RHA user has been attempting to hack into JANET sites, but RHA have been slow in tracking down and dealing with the offender. Hence the ban on all RHA users.

There are ways round a ban such as this if all you want to do is look at a Web page. One is to use the free anonymizer service at http://www.anonymizer.com/ but this can be tedious when accessing more than one page. Another option is to use a program such as Anonymity 4 Proxy (http://www.inetprivacy.com/). This anonymizes your connection so that it is impossible to see which Internet Service Provider you are using.

Once you have installed A4 Proxy you have to instruct your browser to use the program as a "proxy server". There are detailed instructions on how to do this for both Netscape and Internet Explorer. There is a good selection of proxy web servers to choose from and the help files give advice on how to check which are the best ones for your location. If you choose to register the program you are given access to a much larger collection of servers and you can check their speed and availability more quickly. Depending on how you use it, A4 Proxy may slow down your Web access but you can temporarily "switch off" your anonymity and connect to web sites directly.

Anonymity 4 Proxy can be downloaded from http://www.inetprivacy.com/. Registration costs USD 45 for a personal, non commercial license and USD 65 for a business license.

TFTTR Contact Information

Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
UK Tel: 0118 947 2256, Int. Tel: +44 118 947 2256
UK Fax: 020 8020 0253, Int. Fax: +44 20 8020 0253
Address: 88 Star Road, Caversham, Berks RG4 5BE, UK

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