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2008 September

Marinus.Swanepoel — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:38:19 CDT

http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i02/02a01702.htm

From the issue dated September 5, 2008

Medical Wiki Backed by Prominent Colleges Will Go Live by Year's End

By MARIA JOSÉ VIÑAS Medpedia, a new online medical encyclopedia to be written and edited by a collaborative group of thousands, with support from several leading medical schools, is calling for volunteers. But not everyone will be accepted. Only those who hold an M.D. or Ph.D. in a biomedical field need apply. That is one way in which the ambitious project, which plans to go live by the end of this year, hopes to set itself apart from existing medical Web sites. In return for contributors' efforts, Medpedia expects to provide them with a reward. Contributing to the encyclopedia will be a career-booster, its founders say, and participants could gain international reputations as experts. The project is backed by medical institutions like Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, and the University of Michigan Medical School, as well as the National Institutes of Health, the American College of Physicians, and several other organizations. Medpedia is the brainchild of James Currier, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and one of the first proponents of user-generated media. Mr. Currier says his encyclopedia will be the most complete and up-to-date health site online. "The breadth of information we can generate over three or four years is much broader, since we'll have tens of thousands of people with different expertise working on the project," Mr. Currier says. Mr. Currier, a father of four, said the idea for Medpedia was born a few years ago when, every time one of his kids got sick, he spent a sleepless night surfing the Web for medical information. He realized that there was nothing in the health field that was comparable to a major collaborative online project. "It seemed very underdeveloped, like stepping back to 1997," says Mr. Currier, who is managing and financing the Medpedia project through Ooga Labs, his primary company. He expects to bring in money from private donors and foundations, as well as from advertisements on the Web site. Medpedia aims to create pages for more than 30,000 known medical conditions, as well as for the thousands of drugs being prescribed each year. All the available information on a subject will be presented in a single entry, and each topic will have an accessible version for the lay public and a more technical account for health professionals and other knowledgeable readers. Mr. Currier says the wiki format will allow many links between topics, fast updates on the latest advances in medicine, and the use of translation tools that will make the information available to people in other countries. Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University who has done research on Wikipedia's accuracy, says that how Medpedia deals with building consensus on controversial issues will be a critical factor in its success or failure. T. Scott Plutchak, director of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says that although Medpedia looks like a "really exciting and interesting effort," there has already been an increase in the number of authoritative and well-managed consumer information Web sites during the last few years. He said medical librarians will be monitoring the evolution of Medpedia. If the project complies with the Medical Librarians Association's quality standards for health-information Web sites— which include easily identifiable site sponsors as well as frequent updates— the association will recommend it to the public. On the subject of building consensus on controversial issues, Mr. Currier says that "it will evolve over time, and the community will shape it." He points out that each entry will have a debate page attached and that "the community will monitor that page closely," and over time, "will specify new features and language and community norms as we learn how best to handle these controversial medical issues." Linda Hawes Clever, an adviser to the project and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, has been working on ways to lure academics to Medpedia, emphasizing how the medical wiki could help advance their careers. Since the encyclopedia's contributors will create and join committees with areas of expertise, they could become known worldwide as experts in their field, Dr. Clever says. Conflicts of Interest? The editors will be screened for their credentials and, more importantly, to rule out financial conflicts of interest. The application Web site already asks prospective editors to disclose any contributions they might receive "for expressing their views as a member to Medpedia.com." But Dr. Clever says she doesn't like that wording and will suggest switching to a formula similar to what medical journals use. Mr. Currier says Medpedia will have additional mechanisms to ensure that the editors are not biased, including allowing medical professionals to anonymously report conflicts of interest they are aware of. He says editors and users would also be fast to notice and call attention to sketchy edits, such as suspicious treatment recommendations, and such incidents would be recorded forever in the editor's profile. "In a few years, Medpedia will be a safer environment than the real world because so many eyes will be watching," Mr. Currier says. Besides the educational value to consumers, Medpedia will give health professionals a venue to learn from questions raised by the Web site's patient groups, says Anthony L. Komaroff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and editor-in-chief of Harvard Health Publications. Harvard is contributing consumer-health content that will accompany Medpedia's Web pages but won't be available for editing. Dr. Komaroff says he plans to find out what matters to patients by monitoring how the primary wiki evolves, and spotting whether information gets included there that the Harvard developers had initially discarded for their version. "As a practicing physician, I learn from my patients all the time because I've read about their diseases," says Dr. Komaroff. "But they live with them." The National Institutes of Health and the American College of Physicians have contributed to the project with health content that will be editable and expandable after the Web site goes live. The information will be available for everybody to use for noncommercial purposes. First reactions to the Medpedia project announcement seem enthusiastic: The online-encyclopedia team received about 3,000 applications during the project's first 24 hours. http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 55, Issue 2, Page A17

Chrome Alone – What's so great about Google's new browser?

Where can you get Chrome? How fast is it? Should you at all bother about it? We answer all these, and many more questions – about Google's new browser in this "must read" FAQ.
9/3/2008 7:32:00 AM
by Gregg Keizer

Google Inc. ended one of the Web's longest-running rumors today when it released Chrome, a Web browser it's been working on for the last two years.
But while Tuesday's news was all over the Web – from well-known brands to just about every other technology site and blog that had a keyboard to shake – the debut is only part of the story. How, for instance, will Google's push into building a browser affect Windows, Microsoft's golden goose? Will other browser makers just roll over and play dead? Hint: don't count on it. Those questions, like the ones that follow, simply scratch the surface. We're certain to revisit Chrome and Google's plans for it, in future FAQs. But this one will get us going. Where do I get Chrome? You can download the beta from Google's Chrome page, which will only offer the download if rendered on a Windows XP or Vista machine, or in a virtual machine on a Mac or Linux running XP or Vista.
Chrome, a 7MB download, is currently available only for XP and Vista. What languages? Out the gate, Chrome is available in 39 languages, including English, Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish and a slew of others. But nothing for the Mac? What's up with that? All we know at this point is what Google's disclosed, which isn't much. "We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux," the company's heads of engineering and product management said Monday when they confirmed that Google would be shipping Chrome today. However, Google is collecting e-mail addresses from Mac users who want to be notified when a Mac OS X-specific version is available, hinting that a Mac edition is closer to shipping than one for Linux. Chrome will run on a Mac using Apple's dual-boot Boot Camp utility, or in a virtual machine created with the likes of Parallel Inc.'s Parallels Desktop for Mac or VMware Inc.'s Fusion.
How about Chrome for Linux?
You're even more out of luck than people running Steve Jobs' operating system. The e-mail notification for Mac users -- but not for those running Linux -- is more than a hint. Chrome's developer notes spell out the bad news: "There is no [emphasis in original] working Chromium-based browser on Linux," says the build documentation, in red type within a bordered box, no less. That must mean they're serious about "no" meaning, well, "no." Should I bother? Barbara Krasnoff came away with mixed feelings, but in the end recommended that people try Chrome. "At the very least, it will offer a new take on the browsing experience."
And hey, it's free. What's under the hood? WebKit, the same open-source rendering engine used by Apple Inc.'s Safari, also powers Chrome. And Google execs also credited Mozilla's Firefox with providing some unspecified "components" inside Chrome. Oddly enough, or perhaps not odd at all, Apple was the only one of the four major browser makers – the others are Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera -- that didn't bother responding to requests for comment today on Chrome's introduction. Nor did the various WebKit blogs, including David Hyatt's "Surfin' Safari," bother to post entries about Chrome and its use of the engine. How fast is Chrome? The jury's still out. Some testers who have run it through JavaScript benchmarks have reported out-of-this-world results. But others, including Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal -- as far as we know, the only reviewer who got an early look at Chrome -- dinged it for rendering slower than, say, Firefox on Windows. That's our off-the-cuff impression, too. Trying it out in Windows XP, Chrome is no speed demon here, either.
What about its memory footprint? Is it as big a pig as IE8 Beta 2?
Bigger, according to Craig Barth of Devil Mountain Software Inc., who just ran Chrome through the same performance test that he used Monday to name IE8 as "epically porcine." "What we found was shocking," Barth said. "We discovered that it is Google Chrome, not Internet Explorer 8, that is the true memory consumption leader." By his numbers, Chrome came very close to matching IE8 Beta 2 on peak memory use (324MB for Chrome, 332MB for IE8), but used more memory on average (267MB for Chrome versus 211MB for IE8).
Barth attributed the heftier memory appetite of Chrome to its multi-process tabbing model, where each tab is actually a separate iteration of the browser. "It's use of that model, which, according to Google, helps isolate failures and protect complex Web applications, [that] means that it will always use more memory than Firefox, IE 7 and similar, single-process browsers," he said. We haven't had a chance to catch up yet with Barth for a conversation to drill into his data, but we plan to Wednesday. Where do I go for Chrome support? Google's set up a Chrome Help Center here, but there's no support desk to phone or e-mail. Instead, Chrome's support leans, like most of Google, toward self-help. The Center sports some online documentation, but for real problems, you should steer straight to the user-to-user forum where you can ask others questions and hope someone comes up with an answer. No doubt, you'll want to bookmark it for future reference.

September 2, 2008

Microsoft Faces New Browser Foe in Google

By STEVE LOHR

The browser war is back on. This time, Microsoft’s opponent is Google, a familiar foe.

On Tuesday, Google will release a free Web browser called Chrome that the company said would challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as well as the Firefox browser.

The browser is a universal doorway to the Internet, and the use of Internet software and services is rapidly growing. Increasingly, the browser is also the doorway to the Web on cellphones and other mobile devices, widening the utility of the Web and Web advertising. Google, analysts say, cannot let Microsoft’s dominant share of the browser market go without a direct challenge.

Google already competes with Microsoft in online search and Internet advertising. They both make operating software for cellphones. Google is increasingly competing with Microsoft head-on in software that handles basic productivity like word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and e-mail programs. Google has Web-based software in these markets that are low-cost or free alternatives to Microsoft’s lucrative desktop software.
Despite the frequent clashes with Microsoft — including the role Google played in thwarting an attempted acquisition of Yahoo — Google has come out on top only in search and search advertising. But Google does not have to win the browser war. Strategically, opening yet another front against Microsoft forces it to divert resources to defend franchises.

Now, Chrome heightens the rivalry and marks a shift for Google, which has strongly backed Firefox, the open-source browser that has gained about a fifth of the market against the dominant Internet Explorer.

Google’s browser project has been under way for more than a year, a person close to the company said.

In a brief statement, Microsoft welcomed the new entry and expressed confidence that people would prefer Explorer, which is on every Windows PC sold.

“The browser landscape is highly competitive,” said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer group. “But people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online.”

Google has clashed with Microsoft before, saying it had designed IE to gain ground in search, a market where Google is the runaway leader.

After Microsoft introduced IE 7 in 2006, Google complained that the browser’s search box favored Microsoft’s search service. Microsoft responded and made modifications, and a federal judge overseeing the antitrust consent decree against Microsoft determined that the browser design was not anticompetitive.

The first round of the browser wars in the 1990s led to a sweeping federal antitrust suit against Microsoft for the tactics it used to stifle competition from the commercial pioneer in browsing software, Netscape Communications. A federal appeals court ruled in 2001 that Microsoft had repeatedly violated the nation’s antitrust laws. Microsoft later reached a settlement with the Bush administration, which included some sanctions but left the company free to bundle browsing software with Windows, which runs more than 90 percent of all personal computers.

Microsoft recently stepped up its own browser development efforts, given the increasing importance of the browser and signs that Firefox is nibbling at its lead. Microsoft released a new version, IE8, last week to generally favorable reviews.
Microsoft still holds 73 percent of the browser market, according to Net Applications, a research firm. The market share for Firefox has climbed to 19 percent, while Apple’s Safari has 6 percent.

Chrome also puts Google in competition with an ally, the Mozilla Corporation, which manages the Firefox project. Just last week, Google renewed its deal with Mozilla. Under the arrangement, Google Search is the home page for Firefox and Google is its default search bar, and Google makes substantial payments to Mozilla. The agreement runs through November 2011, and will continue.

Google’s cooperation with Mozilla, however friendly, meant that it was ceding control of the Internet’s vital gateway technology — and the dominant supplier of that technology is its archrival, Microsoft.

Given the increasing importance of the browser and its widening competition with Microsoft, Google’s entry into the market is not surprising, said John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla.

“It would be more surprising to me if Google didn’t do something in the browser space,” Mr. Lilly said. “After all, Google is 100 percent on the Web.”

Google’s move, he said, would put “more competitive pressure on us to keep coming up with great browser technology. But having more smart people competing to improve browser technology and the user experience is a good thing.”

Mr. Lilly also noted that Mozilla, while a private company, is entirely owned by the Mozilla Foundation. The browser project was begun to provide an alternative to Microsoft’s browser. “The mission of Mozilla is to keep the Web open, a pure public benefit,” he said. “Others have other motivations and Google’s move also serves to highlight our position in the marketplace.”

Chrome will be available to download in a test, or beta, version on Tuesday, Google announced on its Web site Monday afternoon. The browser will run on Windows. Google is also working on Chrome versions for Apple’s Macintosh, as well as Linux, an open source operating system.

In a curious twist, Google made its online announcement after its plans appeared as a digital “comic book” that was posted by Google Blogoscoped, a Web site that tracks the Internet search giant.

According to Google’s Web site post, by Sundar Pichai, an engineering director and vice president for product management, Chrome is designed for speed and ease of use.

But the other design goal, it seems, was to make sure Google could control how well the growing range of Web-based software it is developing will perform, instead of having to run on a Microsoft browser.

“Under the hood,” Mr. Pichai wrote, “we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex Web applications much better.”

Later, he wrote, “we improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.”

Chrome is based on an open-source rendering engine, WebKit, and an open-source version of Google’s Gears technology. Chrome will also be able to run in a privacy mode, InCognito, so that no information about a person’s browsing is collected. With IE8 last week, Microsoft added a privacy mode of browsing, called InPrivate.

The privacy features, analysts note, could undercut the Internet advertising business of Google, but also Microsoft, Yahoo and others that depend on ads aimed at users based on their browsing behavior. But it is unclear, analysts say, how large a share of users will opt for the privacy browsing mode and give up the convenience of having a browser store sites recently visited in tabbed settings for easy navigation.

How to get paid for your PDF files

Until recently, there wasn't an easy way for a business to earn money from the content it published in PDF form. But all that's changed.
9/2/2008 4:00:00 AM
by Richard Morochove

Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most popular ways to distribute printed information electronically.

But until now, there hasn't been an easy way for a business to earn money from the content it publishes in PDF form. All that's changed. Ads for Adobe PDF powered by Yahoo service - announced late last year - lets you add pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements to your PDFs at the touch of a button. You earn money when readers click on an ad. You may not make big bucks using this beta service, but it costs nothing for you to sign up and try it out. Here are some tips for an effective PPC campaign. Aimed at PDF Publishers The new service is a logical extension of existing online advertising networks, such as those run by Yahoo and Google, which distribute PPC ads for Web pages. With one of these networks, a business simply signs up for an account and then adds code provided by the network to its Web pages. Ads for Adobe PDF Ads for Adobe PDF lets you do the much same thing with PDF documents: After you sign up and submit your PDF for processing, the service places up to five ads supplied by Yahoo on a panel to the right of your document; the ads do not obscure the document's content in any way. The service might be particularly valuable for a publisher that creates a significant quantity of PDF content such as articles, newsletters, and how-to guides. You can distribute PDFs either by posting them on a Web site or by e-mailing them.

Using Ads for Adobe PDF During the beta period--which has no set termination date--a limited number of U.S.-based publishers who apply for an account will be approved (Yahoo hasn't specified the exact number). Setting up an account doesn't cost anything, and there are no monthly fees. But you must provide a fair amount of information in your online application, including details about the number of new and existing PDFs you'd like to submit to the program and the type of content you intend to publish. In my tests of an account that Adobe created for evaluation purposes, I found the service very easy to use. I logged in to my account, clicked the Register PDF button, and uploaded a PDF from my PC. At first, the file status was set to Pending, indicating that the service was processing my PDF. But within a couple of minutes, I saw the file status change to Registered, and shortly thereafter I received an e-mail with the PDF modified to accept ads. The service decides on the number of ads to display based on the level of advertiser demand for placement in the PDF's content. In the PDFs I tested, the service placed four or five text advertisements. Initially, none of the ads were particularly relevant to the PDFs' contents: The PDFs discussed business software, yet all displayed the same ad for natural cosmetics. Within an hour or so, however, the ads changed and became more relevant to software. Each PDF file is registered to display ads from the service for 180 days, after which the publisher may re-register the file (the service notifies you via e-mail when a PDF's registration is about to expire). You may cancel a file's registration at any time, thereby terminating the ad displays.

Limitations of the Ad Service The advertising service has a few limitations. A PDF file must be no larger than 5MB. Files may not include sensitive content such as references to drugs, war, or adult material. You can't change the advertising layout nor the format of the ad panel. Like most PPC ad networks, the service specifies the ad keywords, not the publisher. When a reader opens an ad-enabled PDF file distributed by e-mail, a pop-up notes that sponsored content has been added to the document. It asks the reader to permit an Internet connection to Adobe's Web site. If the reader does not approve, ads won't display. This pop-up does not appear on PDFs linked to a Web page, since in that case an Internet connection has already been established. In the future, Adobe intends to integrate the ad-insertion technology into some of its content-creation software products--perhaps InDesign or Acrobat--so that publishers won't have to use the online portal to ad-enable PDFs. How Much Will You Earn? Earnings from the PPC ads are split between Adobe, Yahoo, and the publisher. Again, there's no guarantee that a publisher will earn anything from displaying the PDF advertisements. How much you make depends on how much advertisers pay for the ads that are displayed alongside your content and how many readers click on them. To earn a significant amount from advertising, you'll need to have a good PDF distribution network, such as a frequently visited Web site or a large mailing list. Earnings are paid out after a minimum accumulation of $100 - unless you opt to be paid via PayPal, in which case you need to earn at least $50 to be paid. Ads for Adobe powered by Yahoo is an easy-to-use, potentially profitable service that merits evaluation by PDF publishers. The service will extend the reach of Yahoo's Publisher Network and may entice more advertisers to run a Yahoo campaign. If nothing else, it proves that Google isn't the only innovator in online advertising. Find out how to use search engines to boost your online business.
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2008 August

Marinus.Swanepoel — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:29:10 CDT

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Scholars' View of Libraries as Portals Shows Marked Decline

By JENNIFER HOWARD Know your library user—and worry about who's not using the library. That's the main advice to librarians in a new white paper that notes "a growing ambivalence about the campus library" among faculty members as more and more knowledge goes digital. The report was released last week by Ithaka, a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of technology in higher education. The paper probes the relationship between libraries and the faculty at institutions of all sizes, and how the digital shift is altering that relationship. The authors, Roger Schonfeld and Ross Housewright, pulled together the highlights from two surveys conducted in 2006: one of American faculty members and another of librarians in charge of collection development. Mr. Schonfeld is Ithaka's manager of research; Mr. Housewright is a research analyst. Ithaka conducted similar faculty surveys in 2000 and 2003, so the new report is able to examine trends over a six-year period. The report confirms what everyone already knows—that electronic resources are ever more central to scholarly activity. It emphasizes that scholars still value libraries as buyers and archivers of scholarship, and many still use them as gateways to scholarly information. However, it also confirms that researchers increasingly find what they need through Google Scholar and other online resources, a trend the report's authors anticipate will accelerate as more and more knowledge goes digital. Since 2003, faculty members across the disciplines have shown a marked decline in how devoted they are to libraries as information portals. Eighty percent of humanities scholars are still devoted to library research—although that may be not because they're traditionalists but because they can't yet get what they need in digital form. But only 48 percent of economists and 50 percent of scientists value libraries as gateways. That should worry librarians whose budgets are eaten up by high-priced science journals. What if the designated users of those materials are sidestepping the library altogether? Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of librarians still consider the gateway function of libraries as essential. "Obviously there is a mismatch in perception here"—one that librarians need to confront if they want to stay relevant to campus intellectual life, Mr. Schonfeld and Mr. Housewright caution. In an interview, the report's authors said that they hoped the report would get librarians talking about whether libraries should "ambitiously redirect resources" toward new and better ways to serve scholars operating in a digital environment. "Right now we're seeing a library community that doesn't seem to be sure and isn't staking a claim to the gateway function," Mr. Schonfeld said. Perhaps some traditional functions, like the gateway role, "are things that libraries can safely retreat from." In an interview, Steven J. Bell, an associate university librarian at Temple University, described the report as "required reading for academic librarians." Mr. Bell posted about the report on ACRLog, a blog run by the Association of College and Research Libraries. In his post, he urged librarians to think past libraries' traditional roles of gateway, archive, and buyer of scholarly material. "We could really carve out a much more significant role" as instructional partners, Mr. Bell said. "The good news is that faculty members still believe that libraries are working well for them," he told The Chronicle. "The bad news is that we're working so well that they may not need us any more." The report, "Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education," is available on the organization's Web site.

Tiny Talents

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Instruction, especially in trivial skills, is one of the Web’s great giveaways.

August 17, 2008

The Medium

Tiny Talents

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

On the Web’s amazing how-to sites, I am studying bar tricks. I should be learning, once and for all, how to do CPR, but all I really want to know is how to mix a Singapore Sling, palm a card and tongue-knot the stem of a maraschino cherry. The best thing about how-to sites like Howcast, eHow, WonderHowTo, Instructables, SuTree, VideoJug and ExpertVillage — huge collections of videos that offer instruction in Chinese dining etiquette and surviving zombie attacks, plating fettuccine Alfredo and linking spins in freestyle kayaking — is that they revive a lost era of two-bit skills, when Cross pens whirled around thumbs, Zippos burst in and out of flames and someone was forever trying to show you how. My favorite online card-trick virtuosos, especially, recall a certain kind of 20th-century drifter who gave impromptu courses in prestidigitation on trains and park benches. His many inside pockets were stuffed with the holy relics of the pre-Google life: a money clip, a pocket comb, a deck of Bicycle cards and all that smokers’ jazz. “Prestidigitation”? Come on! Even the word is a nostalgia trip and a way today to wrest “digit” away from “digital.” Anyway, how-to sites are trippy. Those sorcerers of small things (“pickpockets,” you say? con artists?) have their own video shows — and even reputable demonstrations contain a hint of mischief. On one site, an actress named Roxanne Beckford, who once played nonpregnant characters while pregnant, hosts a video called “Hiding Pregnancy With Clothes.” She tries to say it’s not for teenagers who haven’t told their parents, but who knows who will benefit? These sorts of videos provide hacks and shortcuts for everyone and collectively make life look easy. As the Web’s underpaid teaching corps, how-to instructors are far from being the old television pedants, the omnipresent psychologists of the 1990s who resolved daytime-TV showdowns by having people face the jokers who wronged them. Instead, they tactfully don’t ask why you want to learn something — why declare bankruptcy? why conceal an office affair? — and skip straight to how. Free, usually. Thus, an army of hustlers has become professorial. In dusky colors and tattoos (or, alternately, pink shirts and overlong ties; most are men), they maintain a level gaze and project utter self-assurance. “When you think about it,” says a woman’s voice on the British site VideoJug, “putting your lips onto another person’s lips and moving them about is an odd thing to do.” No matter. Here’s how. As is currently common practice in the world of online video, producers of how-tos typically make or collect a set of videos and mount them on a specialized site. The demos I like these days originate at Kapoof and Easy Bar Tricks. These sites present a limited number of videos for which producers have paid almost nothing (to actors, shooters, editors and graphics people). Often — as appears to be the case with Simon Crack at Free Magic Tricks 4 U — the entrepreneur who had the idea for the site turns out to be the boss, talent and sole employee. This makes sense: it’s hard to get your friends to kick in labor for an online-video project. There’s still no promise of revenue, and no one yet knows what will be a hit on the Web. (“This site really is a labor of love,” writes Crack on his.) You’d think the shoestring budget would mean bad videos, but usually the reverse is true: host sites that are overseen directly by people with pet subjects and personal styles offer video that far outshines the average scrappy upload to YouTube. A recent video on Easy Bar Tricks, for example, shows nothing but a pair of hands, a coin and a bill. With understated amusement, the narrator — who owns the hands, presumably — talks the viewer through a bet he can’t lose: he, unlike those he might hustle, can balance a coin on the edge of a bill folded the long way. As the narrator shows first how hard this is to do, and then how easy (if you know the trick and “the laws of physics”), the hands in the frame are both expressive and supersteady. The physical world seems very manageable, especially if you know where its jokes hide. The trick demo becomes a little William Carlos Williams vignette. In fact, the very best way to see virtually any video is almost always on its home site. Producers play video to best advantage there, situate it amid other material of interest and often attract informative and focused discussion sections. But these home sites — with interchangeable names like Magic Tricks, The Magic Teacher and Cyber Magic Tricks — are not always easy to find. Producers don’t exactly rack up hits as they wait for people to stumble on goofy Web addresses that have no priority on Google. And would-be patrons of small sites don’t know what they’re looking for when browsing the Web for something to do. That’s why the big video sites (YouTube, above all) function best when they increase a user’s chances of glimpsing new stuff. You think you’re looking for aerial shots of Ireland on YouTube, but the site has other ideas: how about Michael Londra singing “Danny Boy,” Roy Zimmerman doing the Beatles as Irishmen, Kathy Ireland posing for Sports Illustrated in 1992? For the person in the mood to learn, the big how-to clearinghouse sites borrow tactics from YouTube and keep users zinging around through various disciplines. The good news is that there are so many how-to videos that the concept is capacious. Visit eHow, and you’re awakened to how much you have to learn. It’s exciting. Want to relieve a foot cramp, become pregnant, charm someone? Don’t get bogged down in worries. Just watch the videos. The major demo sites also try to give credit to production teams — or I should say that production teams try to ensure that they get credit, since their deals with these big sites are typically modest. (About the best they can hope for from the clearinghouses is exposure for their videos and maybe a thousand dollars in royalties if something really takes off.) As a result, producers try to work their names into the video frame by any means possible — using overlay ads, ads affixed to the end of the video or T-shirts on the talent that make the Web addresses clear to viewers. Last month, a hacker-friendly venture-capital firm called Y Combinator published a list of “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund.” No. 13 was “online learning,” which — the firm proposed — could build on popular online test-prep courses. If entrepreneurs are looking for faculty, they might also consult the how-to sites, where magicians might be retrained for science demos and actresses could drill students in memorizable poetry. The guides and gurus look as if they were born to this kind of short film. But the tricksters are the best. They can’t have enjoyed especially steady or high-paying employment in the years before Web video got off the ground. So they’re ready for their close-ups. And centuries’ worth of tricks involving coins and corks finally have a modern showcase. I’ll absolutely be spending the rest of Web summer school with Wayne Phelps, Malik Haddadi and Brandon Nowasky, a motley crew of magic men prone to epigrams like “This card trick’s called Pinky Does It because . . . the pinky does it.” Come September, prepare to be amazed. Post a Comment at The Medium » Points of Entry THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATIONS DEMO DERBY: Currently, the clearest use for original online video is demonstration. Better even than advertising. Much better than entertainment. To admire the range of undertakings on which people will claim expertise — oh, and to learn something — see the big demo sites first, which include Expert Village, Instructables, SuTree, eHow, WonderHowTo and Howcast. Their holdings are growing every day. You might even upload your own video. DECLUTTERING: Slightly more specific how-to sites, devoted to how to, say, get rid of things (from I.B.S. to ghosts), can be useful, and often have a more coherent tone than the wacky single-subject sites, as well as a considered advertising layout that doesn’t drive you bananas, as the ones studded with sponsored links tend to. Get Rid of Things — ‘‘a people’s guide to better living’’ — is well worth a look, as are the sister sites How to Clean Things and How to Write Good. THE NITTY-GRITTY: Web sites like law.justanswer.com (for legal advice) and Black Hair Planet leave nothing to chance. You know you want to know about makeup and hair — and virtually nothing else? DailyMakeover.com is your site. Breaking and entering? Free-lock-picking-guide.com. How to subdue your enemies? GracieAcademy.com — for the basics of Ultimate Fighting ‘‘ground and pound’’ tricks. Yikes.

Preserve Your E-mail With Online Backup
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Start with one of two free backup utilities designed expressly for e-mail: Amic Email Backup, which copies everything--including your address book, account settings, and message rules--to a single compressed file; or Mailstore Home, which duplicates all your mail into a searchable archive and optionally backs it up to CDs or DVDs.

Amic supports nine e-mail clients, including Outlook, Outlook Express, and Eudora. Mailstore Home works with Windows Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey.

Of course, unless you put those discs in a safe or upload the archive file to the Web, those kinds of backups are still vulnerable to fires and other local disasters. That's one reason to consider routing your e-mail through Gmail IMAP, which effectively creates a Web-based archive by syncing mail between Google's servers and your PC.

Start by signing up for a free Gmail account, then enabling IMAP and following the configuration instructions for your mail client. Then you can either configure your mail account to forward all messages to your Gmail account or set up Gmail's Mail Fetcher to retrieve messages from your ISP's POP3 server. From then on, all of your mail will go through Gmail, giving you more than 6GB of storage space for messages and attachments, and some excellent spam filtering in the bargain. Once you have everything set up, you'll forever have copies of your messages available in your Web-accessible Gmail account. That's not only an ideal e-mail backup, but just plain handy, too.

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Preserve Your E-mail With Online Backup

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