1st international browser day 17th April 1998 Paradiso.nl by an-browser http://an.org/browser/day1.html arrival at 12. people around, thing starting. Speeches - webstalker - "from virtuality to actuality" Jury of six 1. rewired 2. waag 3. iod (netstalker) 4. ... popper ("spends a lot of time on the net") 5. vincent 6. NY : if-then waag.org, xs4all.nl, isoc.nl, rewired, iod, ... Attendees(?) Students from art schools guided by their teachers, all from Dutch schools, namely the Sandburg Instituut and the Gerrit Rietveldakademie in Amsterdam and the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht. Browsers Most were not operational but showed the functionality in Macromedia Director. Some where not even presented with computers but by some alternative means, like telling a story and blowing soap-bubbles or fooling around on stage. Some others, however, were close-to-operational c++ programs like the awarded Hilzoom. Many didn't really provide much new ideas but seemed to reflect a lot from current research in, for example, hypermedia database representations and a lot of dreamy visions that people have about future Internet search engines. Furthermore some "browsers" we're mere sites and didn't actually approach the problems of browsing itself. On the whole, however, the event was delightfully fresh and mind-opening. IMO just what the worlds of browsers and the Internet need. On forums like Mozilla.org, Openscape.org etc. and on others like Linuxnet where (us) netheads chat there is constant talk about browsers all day long but obviously from a totally different perspective. It's fun to have all those other thougts around. A lot in the presentations was critics of the engineered world of current Internet tools. I quite agree that both Netscape and MSIE are utterly boring 70's (in a bad way) style tools designed for the most conservative corporate people. In Finland, for example, the Parlament and Nokia are their big customers so the boredom in the looks is easy to understand. It's too bad that others, like the kids in kindergartens getting their first net experiences, have had to suffer from it. Take the opening screen for example: who want's to see the technobabble and infologos there? That comes even if the user has set the opening window (Unix Netscape 4.04). Many of the browsers shown on Friday started with a black screen following the slogan: "Feed your browser and it will feed you" which felt much better, left some peaceful space there to start from. List of presented browsers: 1. Supermarket 2. 3. 4. Potato 5. MouseNet 6. Communicate 7. Full Screen Browser -. TYP a t/m z -. Zapper -. Aquarius -. L.O.G.O.S. -. Living Links -. Endy -. browseR -. Kitchen Browser -. L/TM -. Bubble browser * rewired-guy speech, http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/1627.html "Most software is not a product at all. It's a service. That's why reliability counts more than anything, including brand loyalty, by the way. If Raymond is right, Netscape and Microsoft have been fighting the wrong war all along. Good thing they never started shooting each other." 20. House Wife Browser 21. Kiekeboe 22. Dynamic Bookmark Browser 23. Life in the City 24. 25. Woon Browsers 26. Useful Guide Book 27. Browser 4.0 28. Hilspace 30. Kreis 31. (red/green filters political speech thing) 32. The joy of MAIL 33. donn@ - . Public Browsers - . WebCam Browser - . The Cyber Suprise 37. 38. Afterflex (salekaihdin) - literal references: printed Reader for the day by Society for Old and New media (52 pages) [index: Freed Software Winning Support, Making Waves by Michael Stutz http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/9966.html 5:02am 30.Jan.98.PST The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond http://sagan.earthspace.net/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ Date:1998/03/27 18:52:18 ...] - other stuff: http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/11766.html Ted Nelson is back! and all the other files..