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The Media Foundry^™ Resource Guide

Applying new modes of connectivity
…for electronic commerce, electronic society, and 21st century business

This Media Foundry™ Resource Guide is a critical survey with links to selected resources on new (interactive) media. Emphasis is on hypermedia applied to electronic commerce, electronic society, and 21st century business processes.

Teleshuttle ™ provides consulting on interactive media and electronic commerce, including intranets / extranets.

Links to this area are invited. Suggestions for valuable resources which should be listed here, or for clarifications/corrections to our commentary are welcome and may be sent to info@teleshuttle.com. Our objective is a selective review of interesting resources with value-added editorial commentary and structure, not a flat, exhaustive list of unexplained links. We believe such selective, analytical surveys to be a rich and important new media form.

(Work in progress: 5/12/97. The pressures of other business have prevetnted continuing updates.)

Bookstore: Offline Lives!
Check out The Media Foundry (tm) Library / Bookstore -- Outstanding works of current interest as well as classics which deserve a place on the bookshelves of anyone with a serious interest in new media and electronic commerce. (In association with Amazon.com.)

General New Media / Hypermedia / Groupware Concepts and Technologies

New media technologies are just now starting to mature as individual elements like the Web and groupware are converging to provide a more complete suite of functions, both on the Internet, and in private corporate Intranets. A broad perspective on this convergence is provided in "Extranets and Intergroupware: A convergence framework for the next generation in electronic media-based activity."

In the beginning… (Homage to the giants)

If you think the Web was invented in the '90s, guess again.

"As We May Think," Vannevar Bush's classic, seminal article in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Required reading for anyone who claims serious interest in new media concepts. Quaint in its technology, but still profound and prophetic in its concepts.
"As We May Think" - "A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision, An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished, and What Remains to Be Done," - an MIT symposium, October 12-13, 1995. Homage from the giants who stood on his shoulders (including Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson, who started it all in the '60s, and Tim Berners-Lee who hitched it to the Internet).

Hypermedia and the Web

Hypermedia have been long in gestation, but took off when the Web and Mosiac made it all universal and easy. What we see now offers a basic but powerful function suite. A variety of important additional functions will build on this base.

Many interesting new directions can be seen in the ComMentor project: "As part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, we have designed and prototyped an architecture that supports a generalized form of shared "annotations". It defines an enabling platform for various kinds of third-party value-added information on top of the existing World-Wide Web infrastructure. A rich variety of usages can be readily realized using this platform. These usages include shared comments, collaborative filtering, seals of approval, guided tours, usage indicators, co-presence, and Vannevar Bush-type trails."
Collaborative filtering is one of the emerging extensions that will bring more group interactivity to the Web, as outlined in a brief article by Bob Metcalfe. An example is Firefly.

Intranets and Extranets

Intranets were the new big thing of 1996, with projections that 90% of all Web servers will be used for private corporate networks. Most of the current emphasis is on rushing to build internal Webs, but of deeper interest is the integration of the Web with groupware, and the convergence of enterprise and Internet software, standards, and solutions into a single coherent new media platform. This is the idea of the extranet.

Building the Corporate Intranet is a good primer (which is really a summary of a book, The Corporate Intranet, by Ryan Bernard).
Network World Fusion has added a new Intranet Magazine which includes an extensive resource guide as well as news and articles.

Groupware

Fragmentary groupware platforms have long existed on the Internet in such forms as USENET newsgroups, mail list servers, and IRC chat. More sophisticated, integrated groupware has evolved separately for internal enterprise applications. These areas are now converging, as the flip side of the Intranet buzz.

The IBM Lotus Notes site offers a wealth of background and product information, as is fitting for the acknowledged leader (at least for a while) in groupware. An excellent overview of the key elements of integrated groupware is given in the white paper Communication, Collaboration and Coordination. There is some powerful technology here, which will impact significantly on the Web, whoever wins the battle. Some insight is given in the white paper on Lotus Notes and the Internet, and significant progress is visible in the Domino and InterNotes product information.
Netscape's Collabra unit is racing to match Lotus Notes from a more native Internet technology base, and provides much valuable information in their Groupware Central area, including excellent reports from Seybold and the Yankee Group, and background on complementary products from other vendors.

Media and bandwidth-economics

Parkinson's Law implies that there will never be enough bandwidth for all the wonderful things we want to use it for, but effective hypermedia and groupware can do wonderful things with modest bandwidth. Interactive TV is a bust for this century, but the Web is already a dynamo (even if there might be a "market correction"). We suggest media will tend to be bimodal: 1) text-centric media for intensive knowledge work and commercial activity, with embedded image, audio and video elements, and 2) video-centric media (including audio, virtual reality, etc.) for entertainment and edification, with embedded text and data elements . Video-centric media will be severely bandwidth-limited for the forseeable future. Text-centric media are less demanding of bandwidth, and powerful applications are maturing now. The emphasis of our Media Foundry is on text-centric media.

Some pragmatic opinions on making commercial Web sites effective in a world of limited bandwidth are included in Supporting the Buy Decision: Separating Wheat from Chaff on the Web.
All power to the Web, CD-ROM is dead -- or is it?, a perspective on the greatly exaggerated reports of the death of CD-ROM (New York New Media Association News, August 1996, p. 1).
"1-800-CONNECT: How About A Toll-Free Internet," (from Inter@ctive Week, September 11, 1995, p. 20).suggests that we have been neglecting a simple but major opportunity in Internet economics

New Media in Electronic Commerce, Marketing, and PR

Civilization is based on markets, and markets are based on information. New media create a "marketspace" a matrix of ideas, information, networks, and systems that link potential buyers and sellers in new ways. That marketspace will be a primary crucible of the new media foundry. oncepts

Project 2000 is a five-year sponsored research effort led by Donna L. Hoffman and Thomas P. Novak at Vanderbilt University, "devoted to the scholarly and rigorous investigation of the marketing implications of commercializing hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs) like the World Wide Web and other emerging electronic environments." This outstanding site includes several in-depth papers on conceptual foundations, plus excellent topical items and links.
The concept of marketspace has been used in various ways, but seems to have been coined by Rayport and Sviokla, in "Managing in the Marketspace," Harvard Business Review, November/December 1995. They observe that "information about a product or service…can become as critical as the actual product or service…," and that marketspace transactions differ in content, context, and infrastructure from traditional marketplace transactions. Sam Whitmore pursued this Marketspace concept in PC Week, October 30, 1995.
The Value Chain of Electronic Commerce, by Torrey Byles (GIGA Information Group) presents a diagram of the information components of a seller and buyer's value chain and the network elements that link them -- a nice map of the terrain in which marketspace will evolve.
The Digital Economy offers extracts from an excellent book by Don Tapscott. The Alliance for Converging Technologies (founded by Tapscott) is conducting an extensive, blue-chip, multi-client research study on "Interactive Multimedia in the High Performance Organization: Wealth Creation in the Digital Economy."
Communicating in Chaos: Corporate Presence in the Online World, by Len Ellis (Fleishman Hillard) presents a stimulating survey of the changing rules of the corporate communications game.

Practice - Sites and Applications

McLuhan's Ghost Heats On-Line Commerce Sites (March 3, 1996) by Karen A. Frenkel of CyberTimes provides a nice survey of interactive marketing as a "hot medium," with interesting site links.
Supporting the Buy Decision: Separating Wheat from Chaff on the Web, offers some pragmatic opinions of our own on making commercial Web sites effective.
The Press Room page at Starfish Software (the new Philipe Kahn venture) has a very simple but effective content map-high on navigational utility and low on bandwidth (don't miss the lower section).

Resource Guides

HTMARCOM Showcase is an extensive guide for High-Tech Marketing Communicators in the computer and electronics industries, with sections on High Tech Marketing Communications Specialists, Industry Analysts and Market Research Firms, Trade Publications and Related Marketing Tools, Trade Shows, Conferences and Expositions, and General Multi-Industry Marketing Resources
Sales and Marketing Exchange: Sales and Marketing Tools, Content and Directories, is a searchable guide which includes Providers - directories of sales and marketing firms, agencies & freelancers, and Software - marketing and sales software products.

The philosophy lab - our own recent thinking

Contact Information

Richard R. Reisman, President, Teleshuttle Corporation
20 East 9th Street , New York, NY 10003
(212)-673-0225
e-mail: info@teleshuttle.com

Comments, suggestions, corrections, links invited.