The Human Scale of Serendipity
By Dale Dougherty
Should I write about weblogs, a new form of Web publishing that I mentioned in my previous column, or focus on this month's database theme? I was going through examples of weblogs, and came across a column by Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Gillmor is writing a daily weblog of his trip to Hong Kong, and in his column, "Chinese Database Gift to Humanity," he describes Siku Quanshu, an encyclopedia of knowledge commissioned by the Chinese Emperor in 1772. This project took ten years with over 300 scholars working to compile A Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature, which is what Siku Quanshu means. An electronic version of Siku Quanshu is available for $3900, consisting of 167 CD-ROMs -- a good indication of just how large it is. "This collection represents the gem of Chinese civilization and the major documentation of 5000 years of Chinese history and culture," according to information describing the CD-ROM product at www.skqs.com.
Meanwhile, another San Jose Mercury columnist, David Plotnikoff, was writing about the importance of Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User Guide and Catalog, published in 1992 and now available in a new edition, The Whole Internet: The Next Generation. Krol's first edition contained 52 pages of hand-selected Internet resources in the back of the book -- most were pointers to newsgroups and ftp sites. The World Wide Web barely existed, and there was only a short chapter on it.
