The NCSA is the home of Mosaic, possibly the definitive Web browser. It's also home to this, one of the World Wide Web's most useful resources. This page is full of announcements and descriptions, containing links to the intelligent, the irreverent, and the just-plain-off-the-wall. Regular updates make the What's New Page a superb start for a Net Surf. And if you remember something that interested you last month, don't worry, previous What's New pages are still available. This URL is definitely one for the top of the hotlist...
Dilbert: the Geek culture comic strip
O'Reilly Press is best known for the Nutshell series of Unix books (shelf decoration for the geek home), but Global Network News, their on-Web service is rapidly catching up. It's here that you'll find Scott Adam's comic strip "Dilbert". Dilbert is the archetypal geek, a software engineer who spends time in cyberspace - without his trousers - whilst desperately trying to have a 'Life'. Updated daily, the cartoons are a hilarious slice of net.life. You'll need a graphical browser to get the best from this one. Another must for the hotlist.
By the way, Dilbert's since moved to become the Dilbert Zone at United Media's web site, but don't worry. This link will always point to the right site for your daily fix of Dilbert.
Jaron Lanier invented Virtual Reality, virtually single handed. A bad bout with venture capitalists lost him both his company and his patents, but now he's back, concentrating on what he feels really matters: art and music. His Web home page is a tour de force of the web-weaver's art: an enormous picture (an image-map) hides a series of buttons that take you deeper into his world. And for those that don't use a graphical browser, Jaron's provided text links that serve the same purpose. Worth a visit.
Hypertext isn't that new an idea. Ted Nelson explored it in his self-published 70's book Computer Lib / Dream Machines - available in a late '80s upgrade from Microsoft Press - but the first person to come up with the idea was the politician and thinker Vannevar Bush. His idea was the "Memex" a device that would remember everything done or seen or read, and then index it. He wrote about it in 1945 for Atlantic Monthly, and a copy of his article "As We May Think" is now on the Web. One for the net.historians.
The Web is a tangle of documents, linked by often illogical connections. It's very difficult to find an exact piece of information, and there's no index. This is where tools like the WebCrawler come in. Give the WebCrawler a few keywords, and it'll generate a page of links just for you (but remember to save it for future reference, as it'll be gone next time you visit). Together with the What's New page it'll give you a route into the Web. Put this one on your hotlist.