thecomputersociety.org

PART ONE

June 1st meeting "presentation" on the Internet.

This presentation is about itself. It was made in advance and put on ther Internet before the June meeting.

This method allows us to go to the Library or any other venue with an Internet connection and only take our projector, leaving the club computer at home or in the trunk of the car, as backup. If there is a projector present we can go without any equipment at all.

By preparing our "presentations" in advance and placing them on the Internet, these presentations will be available permanently as archives, accessible to members and non-members alike, at will from their homes or businesses.

This is a big improvement over what we did as The North Florida Computer Society and also as the early thecomputersociety.org

"Presentations" can be uploaded directly to our main website or to anyones personal web site and then linked to. The content of our entire website can be burned to a cd rom and distributed for a small cost. With cd rom based distribution an Internet connection is not necessary.

This will also allow us to have multiple meetings at different locations without the need to repeat the creation of "presentations". We could have a Beach Library meeting and a Willowbranch meeting and a RV Park meeting in Kentucky, all utilizing our "presentations" and archives, on the same evening.

The new web based aspect of our club requires something of our members, which is that they do something, to create "presentations". It is not so different than coming in person to a meeting with a question or something interesting to share.

Bellsouth.net, AT&T.net, Comcast.net and Earthlink all offer subscribers free Internet web space as a place to put web based stuff.

Paid web hosting is cheap from Godaddy or 1&1.com or FDN.com and a host of other hosting services. Our current web site of one gigabyte costs me five dollars a month. ( a hamburger, fries and a drink.)

Presently our web site is just at 9 megabytes in total. Five of that is one file, our radio interview with Jim Katz. There is a very good economy of file size (scale) to be had with web pages that avoid half hour sound files and movies and stuff like that... (avoiding the stuff I like, which is multimedia) We could put 77 times as much as we have now on a single cd rom. We have just begun!

Cd rom distribution overcomes the bandwidth issue and allows back to us the full multimedia content we are now avoiding. As does broadband connection allow the same richer sized multimedia content. Properly constructed cd roms can be used on the Internet to provide active Internet links to what we cannot provide due to copyright and permissions conflicts.

This would be considerable work to custom tailor a cd rom distribution, but highly useful. Also useful would be a custom broadband website seperate from the site for dialup connections. (more work)

"Presentations" in a box are a common method that vendors use nowdays to avoid sending out an actual human being that needs a plane ticket and a hotel room. That economy is available to us as well.

PART TWO

thecomputersociety.org