From hungary-online-owner Tue Mar 28 12:19:28 1995 Return-Path: owner-Hungary-Online Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id MAA14964 for hungary-online-out31415; Tue, 28 Mar 1995 12:19:28 -0800 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id MAA14952; Tue, 28 Mar 1995 12:19:15 -0800 Received: from 100263.15@compuserve.com () via =-=-=-=-=-= for hungary-online@hungary.yak.net (14950) Received: from arl-img-4.compuserve.com (arl-img-4.compuserve.com [198.4.7.4]) (fnord) by nando (8.6.5/8.6.5) with ESMTP id MAA14945 for ; Tue, 28 Mar 1995 12:19:02 -0800 Received: by arl-img-4.compuserve.com (8.6.10/5.941228sam) id PAA08606; Tue, 28 Mar 1995 15:18:29 -0500 Date: 28 Mar 95 15:16:05 EST From: "Rick E. Bruner" <100263.15@compuserve.com> To: Hungary-Online Subject: (HOL) More on Net.Narancs Message-ID: <950328201604_100263.15_EHQ29-1@CompuServe.COM> Sender: owner-Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net Tibor (Andras and Tamas), The Narancs online product definitely sounds exciting. I can't wait to check it out. > It's partly an issue of getting Narancs's layout designer to design something > he'd never tried before -- a home page. A bit like explaining to him what's a homeboy. > (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.) I'm glad you brought this up, because I've wanted to ask some of you gurus about something I recently came across using CompuServe. Using the CI$ gui, CIM, there is a setting someone just showed me where you can chose between two options for the "Host character set": either ASCII or Latin-1. When you chose the second, you can get accents and umlats over CI$ email. When I turned this on, I realized most people in the new Hungary section of the Europe Forum are communicating in Hungarian with proper accents. Is this Latin-1 thing a universal format that's support on the Net as well? Anyone know of it? > > 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. You're kidding? you cant even run a few ads to off-set your costs at all? Non-profit doesn't have to mean complete money-pit, does it? Judging just from the amount of regular advertising, the Narancs is already pretty non-profit as it is. Has anyone approached Soros or another foundation about sponsoring it? Soros is really into things wired. > I'm dying to see how the competition reacts! :-) Is that a joke? What competition? Beszelo? Magyar Hirlap? Zsaru Magazin? You think any other Hungarian news organization is actually going to even *notice* that there's such a thing as the Internet, much less the Narancs' activity thereon. > 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. ... Or you might be able to post classifieds and personals to > fellow Narancs fans. You're absolutely right about local net access (read: prices) prohibiting most locals from using the online version. Between Odin and EUnet, you don't have a total of more than 30 or so commercial SLIP account users in the country. (Steve, are those figures about right currently? Are there other academic users of SLIP services (which is what you need to use a Web browser, right?), or is the EUnet service I'm going through, plus Odin, 100% of Hungary's truly wired population?) I also agree, if you soup it up enough with sexy new services, I think Net.Narancs may indeed be inspiration to get a lot more Maygars wired. You're going to need to do more than add classified order forms to make it worth the $100/month or so it costs to get on the Net here, though. I'm constantly reading of the travails newspapers are going through in the States figuring out how to make an interesting online version of the paper thing. Repeatedly, I see references to Wired magazine's HotWired as the best example so far. (I myself and talking out my butt on this, as I had set aside today to finally finish tweaking my MacPPP and MacTCP software to actually get on the Net myself, but here it is almost 9 pm and, well... Steve, you can read this as an invitation to drop by my place one night this week. ) I do, nonetheless, have a few suggestion (never short of those). Just on the level of "extra articles" as you described, one thought that comes to mind is that reporters could post their entire interview transcripts. That is, if a reporter writes one story based on several interviews, he could clean up the transcripts of his interviews (either typing up from tapes or hand-written notes) and ad these for further background. As a journalist, I'm often frustrated by all the good material that comes out in interviews that I can't include in the stories. Not much extra work for the journalist (certainly less than writing up additional stories, anyway), but possibly quite interesting to readers. Also, databases. This could be a very valuable service to online subscribers. Just huge banks of contacts, with little write-ups, telephone numbers, etc. All the background info your staff has already at their disposal. Reporters' contacts, entertainment editors' write-ups of clubs, business contacts, shops, etc. Add to it as you go along. Live, interactive "conferences" with famous Magyars fielding questions online with wired Magyars from around the Globe. Very important, in a word: English. Face it, anything you put online in Hungarian is going to attract a limited number of readers as your language is, to be blunt, weird and not very well-known worldwide. Almost all Magyars who are going to get anything out of the online world probably already speak reasonable English. And making some services available in English will obviously have exponential effect at broadening the popularity of the service. Which is where I come in. :) Just kidding. That is, I'm seriously proposing help, but not for my benefit. That is, my wife, Adrienne, is a professional translator, Hungarian to English (for Econews, plus lots of freelance work), and a big-time Narancs fan. I just asked her, and, as I assumed, yes, she'd be happy to translate on a weekly basis material, which I could then copy-edit. It would be nice if the Narancs could pay *something* for this service, but she's such a fan even a token amount would do. Perhaps I could help find a sponsor to generate a bit of funds towards this end. I'm thinking along the lines of two or three (at most) of each issue's best articles. If that sounds interesting, please (one of you decision makers) get back in touch via private email. In any event, good luck. I look forward to seeing it online (though whether you get it online before I get myself connected will be a tight race). Cheers, Rick ############# # This message to Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net # was from "Rick E. 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