Interview with Míc Miller - Part 2

[Internet Brothers] Would you please describe how your Area Information Retrieval System (AIRS) developed, its present implementation on The Beeline, and where you want to go with the technology in the future?

[Míc Miller] In the beginning, which was 1994, there was far more doodling and parameter generation than sketching and designing. I intentionally inched into the project. I knew I had to make lots of assumptions and decisions that would have to hold true for a very long time. Some of them were philosophical, many were psychological. Design issues focused on audiences that weren't even online yet. The prime technical objective was to support the greatest percentage and number of audiences possible — including devices that didn't, and still don't, exist yet.

What I ended up with was The Beeline philosophy, the Beeline-AIR System, the Beehive metaphor, a Folk Tech style, the Hit the Hive concept, lots of buzzwords & nonverbal clues, and some fun stuff. The Beeline-AIR System allows the Beehive directory to showcase local Web presence before moving beyond the Hive to the state level and then on to the picks of the Web. What makes this local-to-global approach appropriate is the fact that the Internet's nature has been a dispersed, bottom-to-top proposition since ARPANET's inception.

Its present implementation is a tool I call the Web Army Knife. The tool bars have information, tips & tricks, reference material, tools, and resources — to name a few. I do my utmost to help Newbies become good Netizens. The Beehive directory is basically a virtual parking garage with levels, sections and stalls to park and find content and resources. There are lots of ways to move about it with panic buttons everywhere for help and support.

Where do I want to go? I'd like a chance to take the virtual community concept into virtual reality. But first, I need things like true-3D file formats, photorealistic rendering/mapping/streaming, unlimited leveling and reference file attachments, symbol libraries, a public Internet2, and a staff that knows what they're doing for the long term.

[IB] One of the many services offered by your company is Web publishing. For our new readers, help us understand what should be expected from a reliable, affordable Web hosting service. Describe what a domain is and explain the difference between virtual serving and virtual hosting.

[MM] Reliability, to me, is zero downtime, no glitches, and any surprise is a nice one. However, this is not enough. People have to be found on the Net. I saw Yahoo! losing the load at the end of 1996 and, since then, search engines have cut back substantially on indexing. The era of localized area information retrieval has finally arrived. Then there's all those unnatural URLs. Why can't someone find someone else off the top of their head? Keyword searching has been a plethora of problems for everyone. My solution is to provide affordable home and portal pages in a Beehive directory using a simple address system. All anyone needs to know is the Hive's call letters, like bton.com, the party's county and their phone number. People "Hit the Hive" and are right where they want to be. As for affordability, I think it's having a Web presence solution for any budget, adding flexibility to print media, and reducing advertising costs — which is where the Hit the Hive symbol comes into play.

A domain is a level or area within a hierarchially structured network. A top-level domain has an extension such as .com or .edu. Second-level domains are reserved areas within a top-level domain and use names such as internetbrothers and bton.

Virtual serving and virtual hosting are essentially the same in that both use a Web server to store and publish files on the Net. The difference is who controls the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Most domain names are virtually served by Internet service providers and Web hosting services where their second-level domain names are registered to the customers. If a person or organization is virtually hosted, it might have an address like www.isp-host.net/~accountname. Either way, the IP addresses are assigned to the ISP or host. A virtually served domain may appear to have their own server; but without a Whois search, you don't know where the physical server is and who controls its IP addresses.

[IB] Everyone has their favorite predictions for the future of the Internet. As one who has been around it longer than most, what changes have you witnessed that seem most dramatic and what are some of the technologies you see driving the Internet yet to be?

[MM] During the PC Era, we came to expect an 18-month doubling effect in CPU performance. To me, the most dramatic change today is that we can't say the same about Internet performance. Some areas I'm watching are the Abilene Project, wireless broadband, high-definition Net-TV, cellular clipboards, touch-sensitive kiosks, and user behavior patterns. Like Nicholas, I'm waiting for the telephone, television, and computer to merge so we can christen the Information Age; but unlike Nick, I'm also waiting for someone to sell me a pair of "iGlasses."

The Internet Brothers have implemented hierarchical menus for navigation. Easier done than said.

The hierarchical menus were created using Peter Belesis' © Dynomat DHTML scripting tool from Webreference. Give them a visit, you'll like what you learn.

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"The Beeline-AIR System allows the Beehive directory to showcase local Web presence before moving beyond the Hive to the state level and then on to the picks of the Web."

"The era of localized area information retrieval has finally arrived."