From hungary-online-owner Tue Mar 28 00:53:56 1995 Return-Path: owner-Hungary-Online Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id AAA09808 for hungary-online-out31415; Tue, 28 Mar 1995 00:53:56 -0800 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id AAA09799; Tue, 28 Mar 1995 00:53:43 -0800 Received: from carlson@odin.net () via =-=-=-=-=-= for hungary-online@hungary.yak.net (9797) Received: from odin.net (root@omega.odin.net [193.130.116.3]) (fnord) by nando (8.6.5/8.6.5) with ESMTP id AAA09782 for ; Tue, 28 Mar 1995 00:52:48 -0800 Received: from [193.130.116.13] by odin.net with SMTP (8.6.10/1.2-btv) id KAA05966; Tue, 28 Mar 1995 10:52:22 GMT X-Sender: carlson@odin.net Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1995 10:47:16 +0100 To: hungary-online@hungary.yak.net From: Tibor Beke Subject: (HOL) Re: Narancs on the Net Sender: owner-Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net > Let's return to the topic of the Narancs. I'd like to know about the Web > side of the project - when that will be launched, what it will contain. I won't fail to let you know when it does become available. :-) In about a week, let's hope. It's partly an issue of getting Narancs's layout designer to design something he'd never tried before -- a home page. A prototype of web-Narancs is already in existence -- it has everything but its own name. It preserves headlines in Narancs's proprietary fonts (oh la la la); carrying graphics, even the cover page in a scaled-down GIF format, is merely a technical question. And of course, web-Narancs will show all the fancy accent marks without which our God-forsaken Hungarian souls spiral into despair and decay. (The emailed version presently comes in two flavors: one forgets about accented vowels, and one codes them by ASCII combinations of letters. This latter needs either getting used to or some small conversion gadget, depending on one's operating system and mailer, to read.) As to the contents: the same selection of articles is planned, enriched in look and feel as indicated above. > Is there any intention of selling advertising for the site? Not as long as the site is hix.mit.edu. Remember that HIX is non-profit, thus able to claim room on MITnet, an academic network. There's a very good candidate for a commercial site, but that one won't start up within a month, I'd expect. As to the services it'll offer: that's still under very heavy brainstorming. :-) > What else do you have to say about the project? That I'm dying to see how the competition reacts! :-) Also, let me point out the strange duality (?) between Internet-Narancs in the States (outside Hungary, let's say) and in Hungary itself. The primary audience for email-Narancs is researchers, university students, professionals who stay abroad for a certain length of time. (This was the original readership of HIX.) The plan is partly to keep them informed as to what's happening at home (practically the only kind of article Internet-Narancs carries), partly to establish a certain 'loyalty' in them. Web-Narancs will be broader in scope, in target audience, save in one country: Hungary. :->. For one thing, you'd have to be a major nerd to stare at Narancs on the screen instead of stealing it from the newsstand (of course, it's different when it comes to searching back issues etc); secondly, though I'd love to be contradicted, there are no commercial Web sites in Hungary. The ones outside Hungary are painfully slow to use, due to the poor infrastructure. And even if that were not so, the economics of residential usage -- calculations that you can carry out much better than I -- might forbid the on-line reading of Narancs. In short: Narancs On-Line will have to offer something extra to attract attention in Hungary. It might offer articles the paper edition does not. It might be a vehicle for direct feedback and interaction between the readers and the editors. Tamas Bodoky's narancs-l was an initiative in that direction, and he also came up with the idea of a NarancsBBS. (It being understood that BBS/FidoNet users far outweigh residential Internet users in Hungary. How 'bout Internet users at work? I'd love to see numbers.) Or you might be able to post classifieds and personals to fellow Narancs fans. Finally, if you don't mind my choking the subject to death, this is also an opportunity to raise the awareness of the 'net in the very offices of Magyar Narancs. Such utter, ridiculous trivialities as letting foreign correspondents submit articles by email instead of fax (an issue of access, nothing more), or that Lexis-Nexis is a good thing, or that it's worthwhile to read your email-box more than once in a blue moon. :-) Tibor ############# # This message to Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net # was from Tibor Beke # # To unsubscribe, # send "unsubscribe" to # An announcement-only subscription (less volume) is available # at # Send mail to for more information, # or to if you need human assistance. #############