Working in the Electronic Publishing business, I have been thinking a lot about the Internet, the World Wide Web and the future of publishing in general. Some of the ideas that surfaced in those deliberations can be found guiding the design of this Web site dedicated to the name Grivel. This Ideas Behind This Site page is an attempt from me to write down explicitly my ideas and believes on Web publishing.
Broadly speaking, the Internet contains three things: Information, Entertainment and Advertisement. Usually, they are mixed to a certain extent: advertisement might be used to pay for the information or entertainment used to lure people to the advertisement. Most sites, however, have as their main purpose either one of these three elements.
The same three elements (Information, Entertainment, Advertisement) also make up what are now called the 'old' media print, radio and television. There is a difference, though, between the Internet and the 'old' media: the cost of publishing on the Internet is relatively low. In fact, an organisation like Geo Cities shows that, once Internet connectivity has been established, publishing is essentially free. Except, of course, the actual cost of creating the content...
With publishing being cheap, publications on the Internet also tend to be of a cheap kind. This is bothering some people, and is of course troubling everyone who tries to find some specific piece of information. There is another side to the cheapness of publishing, however, that is rarely mentioned: the fact that it is possible to publish for a tiny target audience. Traditional publishing needs audiences measured in thousands or millions of people in order not to loose money. Internet publishing on the other hand could already be considered profitable if it reaches an audience of ten or twenty people.
It is this small audience principle that I want to explore with this Web site. I have been collecting information about my own surname for a while and thought it would be a perfect theme for a Web site. I expect there might be a handfull of people in the world, now or in the future, who would possibly be interested in the information I am putting up here. For me, that seems to be enough to make it worth the effort.
Please let me know what you think about these ideas. My email address can be found at the bottom of each page on this site; the About Eric Grivel page gives other information on how to contact me.
Back to home page. To alphabetical index. To ID index. To source index.
This site is constructed and maintained by Eric Grivel (egrivel@acm.org).