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About the Computer and Communications Pages

Contents (click on the content item to jump directly to the indicated section):

• Overview
• Organization
• Uses
• Additions and changes
• Advertising
• Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Overview:

These pages have focused on Computers and Communications since December 1993. This index site is unlike the various general index sites (e.g. Yahoo or their ilk) in that it is focused on a specific theme - computers and communications. No flower shops, furniture stores, real estate agencies, or other organizations not specifically related to Computers and/or Communications should submit registration requests for these Computer and Communication pages. By the same token no government agencies, environmental organizations, etc. should submit an entry unless they are specifically computer and/or communication oriented. These others are all useful services, organizations, etc., but they are listed elsewhere. Many such other listing locations are included in the various cross reference sections of these pages. We believe that by focusing on a specific area we can provide more effective customized coverage - with tailored index entries, updated thematic information, etc. that is not possible with the general index sites. Our many readers seem to appreciate this focus.

There are quite a number of organizations/companies which may or may not clearly fit into this theme. One example that comes up frequently is Television and Radio stations. Our current policy is to list such stations ONLY if they have a specific computer and/or digital technology theme. We are generally quite flexible about what gets listed, but we do need to keep some consistency with the theme to keep from being overloaded and to stay out of competition with general listing services.

These pages will remain dedicated to comprehensively listing computer and communication related companies, media, organizations, programs, projects, standards, usenet groups, or whatever with no fancy graphics or other distractions to get in the way.

Organization:

Computer and Communication Entry Page - Entry point to the telecommunications Web structure.

We offer a search mechanism that spans the most generally relevant fields of our database. We also offer focused search categories in our "Standard Terms" and "Geographic" sections.

Related pages in the structure are those for:

1. New Entries - The last 200 new entries.
2. Computer and Communication Companies - the extensive C&C company index,
3. Media (magazines, newsletters, etc.) - only for media with substantial free online content,
4. Organizations (may not fit into the "companies" section),
5. Programs and Projects (typically educational projects),
6. Usenet groups and FAQs, and
7. Standards with direct links to specific sections. We also include a

General Cross Reference with links to other similar indices and a

Compendium with links to direct information of C&C relevance and the

Conference Listings and Internet Conference Calendar (from Automatrix) - a popular feature for years.

Each (locally supported) major section includes its own Cross References section with links to indices in its specific area. Such other indices generally do not have exactly the same focus as the C&C index, but are included for completeness. If you find something in one of the cross referenced indices that you believe should be in the C&C index, please register it or otherwise let us know about it.

All major areas now (summer 1997) include an index number to note how many entries are in a specific subsection - for your interest.

An effort is made to keep all entries in the sections down to one line. This makes the lists easier to scan/page through and keeps the pages themselves smaller so that it takes less time to download them. Of course, just what constitutes a "line" may vary from platform to platform, but the current maximum is about 92 characters. It should certainly stay under 100 characters per line.

The Companies section in these pages is by far the largest section. It is so large that it is indirected one level. This allows users to search just the Companies section and allows them to jump into just specific alphabetic sections (which are more reasonable in size). This whole list is also headed by the letters of the alphabet so that one may quickly jump to the portion of the companies section where companies whose name starts with the selected letter are listed.

Uses:

• Look for a known company, organization, program, project, or standard to get more information about it. There is a search engine that will search the entire set of pages (except the conference pages supported by Automatrix) for a given string. There is also a separate search engine for just the Companies section (the largest section in the set). The search does not include all the introductory text, but IT DOES include all the URLs and other syntactic characters in the pages. This means, for example, that a search for "html" or "www" is unlikely to be productive (i.e. it will return almost everything).
• Page through any of the lists looking for relevant information. This is most reasonable for the shorter lists, but some people do like to look at the larger lists or pieces of them just to get an idea what is there.
• Use a text searching facility (e.g. the "Find in Page" or "Find (in this page)" commands in the "Edit" menus) on the browser being used to look for a company, a primary product or product type, a location, an organization, a standard, etc. Such text searching can also be useful in conjunction with the form based search engine by allowing a second level of search after an initial list is returned (the current search engine does not currently automatically support repeated search refinement).
• Use the Geographic page to find links that are specific to a given country, state, or city.
• Use the Standard term page to find links specific to a given topic area.

When searching a portion of this page set, the line that comes after a listed name becomes essentially a list of key words. An effort has been made to keep these "key" words reasonably meaningful. For example, locations use standard abbreviations for U.S. states, Canadian provinces, and Australian states and territories. Cities are mentioned when possible. Product or service information for companies is kept brief and "key wordy".

Additions and changes:

Please note the following Policies:

1. Requests for removal will always be granted directly.
2. Entries are limited to "one line" - roughly 90 characters.
3. URLs with restricted access (domains, passwords, etc.) will not be listed.
4. Use of upper case characters is limited - abbreviations are OK.
5. One entry per company - divisions, subsidiaries, etc. are not listed separately.
6. Uninformative advertising such as superlatives are not included in the listing entries. Superlatives are fine for the up front advertising entries.
7. Sites that send out unsolicited audio will not be listed (as a courtesy to our readers who do work related research with out site).
8. We find that sites that are not pointed to by a direct DNS name tend to be so transient that, as a service to our readers, we only list such sites under special circumstances (e.g. special interest).
9. Sites that are served by one of the advertising supported free Web hosting organizations are typically not listed, both as a service to our readers to keep them from being confronted with the advertising that supports such sites and because of the transience and general lack of support as noted in #8 above.

We are available to discuss the above policies via e-mail to <>.

We test every URL added to this list, but usually very briefly. Such testing provides useful insights to the portion of the WWW that we focus on. However, if we spend more than 2-3 minutes on each new entry it overruns our time budget, so please don't expect too much time for review through e-mail conversations.

We are happy to make whatever changes people want to these lists within reason. About 95% of the listed items come from registration requests. The remainder are collected from incidental use of the Internet, WWW, and as secondary results of direct registrations. This is an actively maintained list. Some checking is done to eliminate dangling URLs and keep data up to date, but comments from users are always appreciated in this regard and are much more likely to result in quick correction of outdated material. We recently added a feature that allows entries to be directly updated from the Registration Page.

Technology notes:

Advertising notes:

Frequently asked questions (FAQ):

We are also frequently asked: "How often are these pages are accessed?" During January 1999 the number of accesses was averaging about 4,000 per day (that is "impresssions" or "page views" - not "hits" of which there were 3-4 times as many). Since most of our advertising options are charged by the page view or by the click through, we have a variety of software packages to log and audit accesses to our pages. If you would like more information about access counts for these pages, please contact our editor.

We are also frequently asked: "What sites link to yours?" We now have a list that we have composed from data taken since March 1996 that lists the top 2000 referring sites that have pointed to our pages.