Internet Alchemy

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has published a new recommendation titles Dublin Core Qualifiers which describes a set of additional elements that can be used to qualify Dublin Core metadata. For example, the Date element has been enhanced with these qualifiers: Created, Valid, Available, Issued, Modified.

I missed this article on categorising news for use by computers:

“Computers and devices are largely unaware of events taking place in
the world. This could be changed if news were made available in a
computer-understandable form. In this paper we present XML documents
called NewsForms that represent the key points of 17 types of news
events. We discuss the benefits of computer-understandable news and
present the NewsExtract program for converting text news stories into
NewsForms. “

12 Jul 2000 7:40 GMT

A new survey by Cyveillance estimates that there are 2.1 billion
pages on the web, and that it’s growing at 7 million pages per day.
Some other stats they gathered in their survey:

Average size of pages: 10,060 bytes

Average number of internal links per page: 23

Average number of external links per page: 5.6

Average number of images on a page: 14.4

Percentage of US vs. international pages: 84.7% /15.3%

I wonder how many of those 2 billion pages are actually useful? Less
than 1%?

Also, how effective are search engines going to be as the web
becomes larger? What’s the next step for them? I’m interested in how
people currently search for information, so I’ve set up a little
poll:

When searching for information about a particular topic, which do you
turn to first? (Search Engine, Directory, Other)

It’s deliberately vague on the concept of information. Imagine you
need to understand a particular technology you’ve never used before,
where do you look first to find information about it?