Joel Tucker | Web Communicator | 561/845-5417

The Rise and Fall of a Reluctant Webslave

The cutting edge of Cyberspace is corporate America, where lightning fast servers and closed-loop intranets become hypertext pressure cookers.

If you ride the cutting edge, don't fall forward.

Webmasters hope
you never learn:

This is NOT programming!

It took some doing to convince web writers that copyrights don't come bundled with the Sunday comics.

In 1994, Netscape was an upstart who dared to make money on the Internet.

Everybody wants to be "Webmaster." The most democratic free press ever is stifled by this "Dungeons & Dragons" terminology.

Webmasters are a lonely breed. No one wants to be a Webslave.

Hopefully, you're too busy to mess with web weaving. No sweat. I'll take care of it.

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Babes in Cyberspace

But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Quarterly blood drives, monthly meetings, annual holiday specials and weekly class schedules never end. Plus, the advent of CNN and the excitement of the Gulf War encouraged a ravenous appetite for news.

When whaling was common, processors threw carcass scraps on the fire until the whales were being rendered in a fire of their own fat. So it was with my beloved daily flyer. Scraps of one edition were reprocessed for the next and wrapped in today's news items.

My readers -- primarily engineers and other white-collar workers -- were becoming information fatcats indeed. My little newsletter was constrained only by what fits on a letter-size page -- a concession to those last few employees who had neither desk nor computer. Margins grew narrow. Typefaces shriveled. Headlines grew more abbreviated; sentences, more terse. The blank side became as full as the front, and still the demand for information grew.

The beginning of the end was in late 1994. A team of programmers and power UNIX users was debating whether the Web was a proper use of the Internet. The Internet was a tool, a firehose of technical data to customers and the home office. The Web was a toy, a fun but inefficient diversion of resources. Someone on the team noted that companies were using the Web to advertise, perhaps even to communicate, so they called Communications Department.

Those first web pages, lacking such frills as frames, tables and centered type, were springing up inside the company's computer network. The same tangle of wires installed to deliver e-mail was becoming an underground news network. Most managers were too technophobic to type, so they didn't have the computer horsepower required to even view these pages.

1994 -- Netscape was an infant upstart who dared to make money on the Internet. We considered sticking with Mosaic, the public domain browser that gave the Web its graphic face. We debated whether internal web documents should be regulated, censured or subject to accountability. If our intranet was to survive that eventual management review, it had to get rational before it grew much larger.

When any word or graphic can link to any word or graphic and be seen by everyone on the network, the potential to communicate is enormous. But in the absence of traditional publishing discipline, nobody stopped to ask whether copyrights, libel laws or accountability might apply to these documents.

The Internet itself was international, beyond the boundaries of any particular lawmaking body. The internal web -- we hadn't yet stumbled across the term "intranet" -- had the same look and feel. It took some doing to convince web writers that the company was responsible for this material, that copyrights don't come bundled with the Sunday comics, that a reader has a right to know where information comes from and how old it is.

I wrote a policy governing web documents and had it approved by MIS, Legal and HR. It worked so well, most of the corporation's far-flung subsidiaries adopted some version of it. There was an orderly page hierarchy that roughly matched the structure of the company itself. And with some known person taking responsibility for each page, one page could link with others based on the merits of the information. The web became both a database shell and a communications tool. Every page had a link to the local home page, where important reminders could be passed along.

Everybody wanted to be the "Webmaster," but in a population of engineers, programmers and artists, it simply wasn't necessary. Every page has an owner and a feedback mechanism: It's your page, you fix it! The policy kept every web writer squarely in line with his or her supervision, no less on the web than on paper or in the board room. More than 200 people learned basic HTML, and the term "webmaster" was banished from the web.

With policy guidelines as a safety net, scores of information owners learned HTML and contributed to the web. I was privileged to manage "the" home page, using hyperlinks to draw the best and most important pages to the forefront. More than 4,000 unique users posted 10,000 hits every week. Every department had a home page just two steps into the web. Departments could communicate their own messages -- which gave the little newsletter room to breathe. No one had to wait in line to see the webmaster -- and the newsletter editor became less critical as well.

It seemed like a perfect intranet setup. It permitted, taught and encouraged employees to communicate for themselves, and to do so responsibly. They were encouraged to use existing pages as templates to speed development. The web required little supervision, so it was no great burden on the home office webmaster when the web was consolidated, along with all other overhead items. My webslave duties had reached an abrupt conclusion.

Yes, your narrator was canned, outsourced, downsized, shuffled out the door, along with 200 other employees that day and a few thousand over the years.

I had become neither fish nor fowl, having grown these funny little feet on my fins but lacking wings to soar with the programmers. My detractors will at least admit that my example, policy and presentation encouraged widespread participation in web development and shared responsibility for its upkeep. Opinions vary on whether that was a good idea. If I had left the veil of mystery in place and made it look more difficult, I might still have the job today.

All of which is bad for me but good for you, because now the cat's out of the bag. I can't run your server or fix your computers, but I can build a great web quickly and even teach you and yours to do it yourself. Hopefully, you're too busy to mess with it. No sweat; I'll take care of it. Need help? Let's talk: 561/845-5417.

Joel Tucker | Web Communicator | 561/845-5417