Back in my college days there were a number of characters who were themselves institutions comparable in influence and stature to my school's ivy-covered hundred-year-old buildings. Columbia's odd juxtaposition of a serene campus within New York City seemed to invite all kinds of people.
Among the most notable to me was Sam. He was, I think, in his eighties when he began to hawk his unique, colorful, magic-marker naive-surreal paintings along with Hershey bars and cheap costume jewelry. "Got new paintin's, Hoishy bars, joowry!" was a familiar daily sound. Sam is gone now, although his work has been immortalized on book covers, albums, and even in a museum in Europe.
I get a lot of questions from Internet World readers who have figured out that I love to Net surf and that my taste is eclectic. A typical question might go as follows. "Loved your recent article." (Honest, they say that.) "I'm wondering if you know where I can find . . ." It will go on to describe an area of interest about which the reader hopes to locate a database, or people with whom to discuss the topic.
I've begun to realize that many new users think of the Internet as a gigantic candy store, or perhaps a sort of cyber Santa Claus (a gift server?). This is not necessarily a bad mindset for using the Internet. In fact, more experienced users who have grown accustomed to the limitations of the Net's resources could possibly take a cue from this seemingly simplistic approach. However, I do think a few tips about knowing how to ask and where to look will help to make Internet users' time on-line more fulfilling.
Now, of course, finding candy bars or other food on-line is no big stretch. Candy machines and Coke machines abound on the Net (see "Best Hookups" in this issue). If you haven't found one yet and don't know what this is, your first lesson in searching the Net is: Download or point to the most recent Yanoff Special Internet Connections list (FTP to csd4.csd.uwm.edu, cd /pub, get inet.services.txt; or Gopher to gopher.uwm.edu, Remote Information Servers, Special Internet Connections; by e-mail: bbslist@aug3.augsburg.edu; by WWW: http://www.uwm.edu/Mirror/inet.services.html; http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/Yanof f.htm; or http://www.austin.unimelb.edu.au/yanoff.html). A nice Sunday morning drive can be had just by cruising this ubiquitous compilation of sites. I download the list every month and initiate a search for the plus symbol (+) used to denote new entries.
There is pizza served on the Net; well, virtual pizza that is. You place your order, select your toppings, and a GIF file of your special combo is returned. A tool called WebCrawler will help you find the pizza, and this tool is somewhere on the Web. Your task is to find it. Be careful as you compose your search. You may get more than you anticipated. (Also, don't burn the roof of your mouth.)
If you are not yet using a Web browser such as Lynx or Mosaic, a wonderful addition to the world of Archie and Veronica is Jughead. Your second lesson is to find Jughead. Veronica lurks in Gopher, and you can search and retrieve a wide range of documents and other reference points with this tool. Jughead acts as the ultimate Gopher directory in that it will compile a huge directory of Gopher links based on your search.
Have you posted to the Usenet yet, or are you afraid that you will make a fool of yourself? Go ahead. Millions have already made fools of themselves. To me, the hardest part of Usenet is getting an overview of what groups are out there. Every time I would initiate a newsreader from Unix, I would be overwhelmed by the number of groups to which I could subscribe. Once you fathom the major groupings; alt, comp, rec, etc.; you then must contend with local or international groups such as ny or chile.
Graphical browsers such as WinTrump handle this beautifully. When I began using it, I suddenly could see the entire overview of the newsfeed that my domain receives. For the majority of users who are in text mode, I have found that clever use of wildcards in the commands that start my newsreader or commands available from the newsreader's search mode will help me to fish for an area I seek. I use the tin newsreader, for example, which can open in quick mode as "tin -q [groupname]." If I am looking for items for sale, I might enter "tin -q *sale*." Experiment with different positions of the asterisk and variants on the keyword you are using. Experiment with the positions of dots. If you are curious to see an overview of the Usenet, Gopher can do this for you.
A word of advice: If you are thinking of posting with a question, first try to find an answer on your own. This will not only save time but may also lead you to the next question you did not know you had. This is a good way to sharpen your research skills and achieve a better understanding of the scope and limitations of the Internet. Besides, no one should miss the opportunity of trying to decipher a manual.
A while back I decided that I would need to filter my mail into separate mailboxes based on the subject line. That way, I could store in separate locations all the questions regarding Internet World, for example. So I proceeded to read news postings about mailing, and this pointed me toward the filter and procmail programs, which had manuals that may as well have been written in Sanskrit.
I persevered, however, and after a month of mishaps and even some bounced and lost mail, I got my filters sort of working, although I lost the ability to see when new mail had arrived to the filtered mailboxes. So I developed elaborate shellscripts to take care of this quirk of the filtering routines. Somewhere several months into this methodology, I came to the realization that the only filtering I really wanted was the creation of categories in which to save mail.
My art gopher area (gopher://gopher.panix.com/11/nyart) also generates a lot of mail. Here I usually see more specifically detailed questions because the more finite and focused interest area of the arts is the issue at hand. Often artists are looking for others who work in their medium or deal with the particular subject matter or style in which they are currently interested. Networking with others, in the generic sense, is one of the strongest elements in your professional; and social; arsenal of tools.
People associated with a particular interest will also have knowledge of the areas that are peripheral to the focus of the group. Artists, for example, know a surprising amount of information about the printing industry. This is because they must vigilantly oversee the reproduction of their work to guarantee its integrity, and because many artists have supported themselves by laying out display advertising and have worked in the field. In your quest for some specialized resource, try to visualize the professions that are the most likely to be connected to the tools or data you seek.
So, is the Internet a big candy store? If you find what you need consistently, then maybe it is, and fortunately it's not fattening. I view the momentary offerings on the Net like encounters with Sam. Some days he had a whole new body of work with an entirely new style. "I got cats and boids today, and a poiple snake." Sometimes he had jewelry, and sometimes he didn't. But he always had Hersheys and he always made his rounds each day. The expansion of the Web has created a delightful array of pushcarts and street performers in cyberspace. You can't expect to find exactly what you want all of the time, but if you try sometimes you just might find. . . you can grep what you need.
Kenny Greenberg (kgreenb@panix.com) is a neon artist and owner of Krypton Neon in Long Island City, NY.
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