LISNews: Librarian News

Barbara Shapiro writes \"Fascinating article about how the Web is developing same structure as plant life. Here at the Seattle Times\"

This is a really neat article that claims the average degree of seperation on the web is 19 clicks. If you buy the 6 degrees theory, this is very similar.

Thus was born the \"19 clicks of separation\" theory of
the Web. This scientific effort to size the Web has
helped reveal the organic way in which the global
network is growing.

Like the celebrated \"six degrees of separation\" that
supposedly can connect any two people on the planet,
researchers at the University of Notre Dame recently
estimated that any two randomly selected sites on the
Web are connected, on average, by 19 clicks.
The Notre Dame team says, on average, you can get
from one site on the Web to any other randomly
selected site in about 19 clicks.

Slashdot.org is the inspiration for lisnews.com (as some of you were nice enough to point out). Forbes has a fantastic Story Here on slashdot, and the hordes of readers they have. If you\'ve ever visited slashdot, this story will be worth a read.

With an active readership estimated to be as high as 700,000--staggering by new-media standards--Slashdot has become a Web leviathan. \"[For] geeks like me,\" he chuckles, \"Slashdot is different. People who are just like you comment on it--people who actually know sometimes what they\'re talking about.\" -- Read More

First Monday, \"A Peer reviewed Journal\", has a short study on how people search. See it HERE,

This paper presents findings from a study of how knowledge workers use the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work. Thirty-four users from seven companies took part in the study. Participants were mainly IT specialists, managers, and research/marketing/consulting staff working in organizations that included a large utility company, a major bank, and a consulting firm.

The research presented here suggests that people who use the Web as an information resource to support their daily work activities engage in a range of complementary modes of information seeking, varying from undirected viewing that does not pursue a specific information need, to formal searching that retrieves focused information for action or decision making. -- Read More

YAHOO! was down on
2/7/99 due a denial of service attack.
News.com has The
story.

These pranks have generally targeted much
smaller sites to date. But
Yahoo\'s outage today shows that even Internet giants with
ostensibly
enormous networking resources are not immune from such
attac -- Read More