LISNews: Librarian News

A good read from Boston.com discussing just what this thing called Cyberspace is. I\'m not sure what or where it is, but I know I\'m there an awful lot.

No one had even heard of cyberspace until William Gibson coined the term in his 1984 cyberpunk novel NEUROMANCER. Now just about everyone in the industrialized world seems to know about it. But even scholars who have spent years studying it can\'t agree on what it really is. -- Read More

--or an even bigger knowledge gap

The Daily Mail and Gaurdian in South Africa, has a Story on the promise, and problems, the internet brings.

The internet is being proposed as a cure-all for the developing world\'s education problems ... but barriers of electric power, telephone lines and basic literacy put it beyond the reach of most third world pupils. -- Read More

Could hyperlinks become illegal? The NYTimes has a story on a ruling that may cause all linking to be considered illegal.

In a ruling that could undermine the freedom to create links on the Web, a federal judge in Utah has temporarily barred two critics of the Mormon Church from posting on their Web site the Internet addresses of other sites featuring pirated copies of a Mormon text. -- Read More

The USA Today Reports
DoubleClick Inc., the Internet\'s largest advertising company, has begun tracking Web users by name and address as they move from one Web site to the next, USATODAY.com has learned.

The practice, known as profiling, gives marketers the ability to know the household, and in many cases the precise identity, of the person visiting any one of the 11,500 sites that use DoubleClick\'s ad-tracking \"cookies.\"

What made such profiling possible was DoubleClick\'s purchase in June of Abacus Direct Corp., a direct-marketing services company that maintains a database of names, addresses, telephone numbers and retail purchasing habits of 90% of American households -- Read More