Mosaic is the Killer Application of the Internet. Part 2

Combine free information with a tool like Mosaic, and the on-line world will never be the same. Combine Mosaic with the Internet, and you have a massive devaluation in the value of information. The reason for this is that the Internet encourages simple browsing of information from around the globe.

To the information consumer on the Internet, information is and should be free. This type of thinking will lead to increased commodity pricing of other information services, and over time, will erode the revenue base of the large, established commercia l information database vendors.

Organizations like Dow Jones, Infoglobe, Infomart, Dialog and Nexis should be shaking in their boots when it comes to the Internet. But not just because of the pricing — but because Mosaic will also change the perceptions of the way that people use, a ccess and search on-line information.
Mosaic — Global Information Searching

The Internet has been known to be a difficult system to learn to use and navigate. This is no longer the case : with Mosaic, the world of the global Internet is available for simple navigation by anyone with a Macintosh, Microsoft Windows or a Unix sys tem with a graphical user interface.

Mosaic represents a fundamental shift in the way people use and access on-line information. By making it simple to search for information through a graphical interface, it makes on-line searching downright fun. First and foremost, Mosaic is a fun system.

More importantly, Mosaic is nothing less than a full text, hypercard searching system. While this might not sound very important (although it could be a useful phrase to impress people with at a cocktail party), when you consider that it is a global hypertext system, the reality of Mosaic starts to sink in. Let’s take an example. When you begin a Mosaic search, you might start out somewhere on the Internet — on a document that contains references to other documents. The document on the screen in front of you will have certain words highlighted. When you move your mouse to one of the highlighted words and double-click, Mosaic takes you to the document that the word printed to — wherever that might be in the world.

Bang! One moment you are reading a document in the UK about population growth trends in industrialized countries. Click! You’re in Paris, looking at subway maps of major cities. Click! You’re in Australia, reading about aboriginal history and the impac t has on culture. Click! You’ve got a cartoon on the screen of nasty things being done to Barney the Dinosaur, coming from a cyberpunk server in Seattle. Click! You’re reading a journal about new computing devices in Baltimore.

In essence, with Mosaic, you point and click your way around the world, through increasingly vast libraries of information.

At one point while writing this article, I came across a reference to dinosaurs….highlighted in blue on the screen. With my seven month old son on my lap, I figured this would be just the thing to go and explore : and before I knew it, I was logged o nto a computer somewhere on the Internet, looking at a picture of a baby Hypselosaurus.

My son was impressed.

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