Rheingold spins a new Web - publishing on the World Wide Web; includes example of author's home page and a Web-published piece on a Tibetan Lama

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1995 by Howard Rheingold

The next eight pages were assemble by current or escaped Wholf Earthers. Howard Rheingold opens with two pages on what the World Wide Web is (a why it is), succeeded by a two-page simulacrum of part of his own (very large) Web acreage. Winslow Colwell, who designed these (magazine) pages, follows with a spread on The Millenium Whole Earth Catalog's Web pages. Todd Tibbetts and Mike Stone conclude with information on finding your way around the Web and making your own Web site.

MY MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE expanded dramatically when I first read a Whole Earth Catalog. Years later, my worldview changed with similar suddenness the first time I played with Macpaint. in 1985, I joined the Well, discovered the Net, and my life got changed again.

This time, it's called the Web.

The World Wide Web is a subset of the Internet. It links computers all over the world, enabling people to browse through words, sounds, and images, and to publish multimedia documents. The Web is also a subculture, an art form, a communication tool, a new industry and, for more than a few obsessive souls, a way of life.

I believe that the software that enables people to publish words, images, and sounds through the Internet might be important in the same way that the printing press was important. By expanding the number of people who have the power to transmit edge, the Web might trigger a powershift that changes everything.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, who worke at CERN, the European high-energy physics laboratory, released so ware that made it possible for scientists to share data, including visually displayed data. WWW software made possible cooperative information-sharing among entire communities of networked computers in different parts of the world. In the US, the National Center for Supercomputer Applications created Mosaic, a free software "browser" that made it possible to navigate the Web in its full graphic glory. Over a million copies of Mosaic were downloaded within a year. In 1995, all the major online services surrendered to the power of something nobody really planned to take over the world: America Online, Compuserve, Microsoft Network and Prodigy all announced plans to include Web-viewing capabilities.

The old dream of a global hypermedia library, envisioned by Vannevar Bush, pioneered by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart, has materialized. The key to the Web's power is that anybody can create a direct link to any material on the Web from anywhere else on the Web. If you were reading this via WWW, the word CERN might be underlined; if you mouseclicked on the word CERN, the browser software would automatically connect your desktop with the online files stored in CERN's computer in Switzerland. You could view pictures of CERN, download libraries of papers, and view computergraphic representations of physical datasets. Some further link from CERN might lead you to explore (for example) chaos theory through fractal graphics.

For schoolkids in Saskatchewan or Kazakhstan, access to the Louvre and the Library of Congress is pretty significant in itself. But the greatest power of the Web is not in its capacity as a continually updated, globally accessible, multimedia encyclopedia, but as a publishing medium. If you want the world to see and hear what you have to show and tell, all you need is a computer, an Internet connection, and someone who knows how to set you up as a "Web site" (or the knowledge of how to do it yourself). The low cost means that all kinds of people can display their work without intermediaries. Every day, some astronomical observatory or biomedical institute puts up its "home page" -- its multimedia face to the world. So do cartoonists, pop musicians, senators, sophomores, commercial enterprises, and political activists.

Last year, as I was finishing work on the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, I began to sketch ideas, build a team, and meet with the other principal architects of Hot Wired -- the first commercial Webzine, backed by the founders of Wired magazine. The eventual product of six months of team effort proved commercially and culturally successful, but it was, inevitably, Wired's vision. After designing and launching Hot Wired, I resigned and immediately started working on my own Web page.

To create images suitable for Web publishing, all you have to do is read in a scan or image from a digital camera or graphic created with a computer graphics tool, use the cropping and sizing options to create a small-enough image, change the mode of the image to "indexed color," and save the processed image in Compuserve GIF format. That gives you a computer file that, properly installed, will turn into a graphic image on a Web page. Small size and limited colors are necessary to reduce the size of the digital file; the larger the file, the longer it takes the reader's computer to read it, and thus the longer the reader must wait to see it.

If you are a self-expression junkie, a digital artist who wants to exhibit, or a columnist who wants to self-syndicate, consider Web publishing. To prepare your words for publication, save them as a "text-only" file. Then you find links by surfing the Web. Since thousands of Web sites become available every day, it is impossible for anyone to keep track of them. So when you find something important, you can create links from your own document.