ZaMir.net

ZaMir.net started in 1992 trying to enable anti-war and human rights groups of former Yugoslavia to communicate with each other and co-ordinate their activities. Today there are an estimated 1,700 users in 5 different Bulletin Board Systems (Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo and Pristiana). Za-mir Transnational Network (ZTN) offers e-mail and conferences/newsgroups. The ZTN has its own conferences, which are exchanged between the 5 BBS, and additionally offers more than 150 international conferences. ZTN aim is to help set up systems in other cities in the post-Yugoslav countries that have difficulty connecting to the rest of the world.

History

With the war in Yugoslavia anti-war and human rights groups of former Yugoslavia found it very difficult to organize and met huge problems to co-ordinate their activities due to immense communication difficulties. So in 1992 foreign peace groups together with Institutions in Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade launched the Communications Aid project. Modems were distributed to peace and anti-war groups in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade and Sarajevo and a BBS (Bulletin Board System) installed.

As after spring 1992 no directs connections could be made they were done indirectly through Austria, Germany or Britain, which also enabled a connection with the worldwide networks of BBS's. Nationalist dictators therefore lost their power to prevent communication of their people. BBS were installed in Zagreb and Belgrade and connected to the APC Network and associated networks. Za-mir Transnational Network (ZTN) was born.

Strategies and Policies

With the help of ZaMir's e-mail network it have been possible to find and coordinate humanitarian aid for some of the many refugees of the war. It has become an important means of communication for humanitarian organizations working in the war region and sister organizations form other countries. It helps co-ordinate work of activists form different countries of former Yugoslavia, and it also helps to coordinate the search for volunteers to aid in war reconstruction. ZTN also helped facilitate exchange of information undistorted by government propaganda between Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia. Independent magazines like Arkzin (Croatia) and Vreme (Serbia) now publish electronic editions on ZTN.

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Advertising and the Media System

Media systems (especially broadcasting) can be classified in two different types:

Public Media Systems: Government control over broadcasting through ownership, regulation, and partial funding of public broadcasting services.

Private Media System: Ownership and control lies in the hands of private companies and shareholders.

Both systems can exist in various forms, according to the degree of control by governments and private companies, with mixed systems (public and private) as the third main kind.

Whereas public media systems are usually at least partially funded by governments, private broadcasting solely relies on advertising revenue. Still also public media systems cannot exclude advertising as a source of revenue. Therefore both types are to a certain degree dependent on money coming in by advertisers.

And this implies consequences on the content provided by the media. As the attraction of advertisers becomes critically important, interests of the advertising industry frequently play a dominant role concerning the structure of content and the creation of environments favorable for advertising goods and services within the media becomes more and more common.

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RTMark

RTMark is a group of culture jammers applying a brokerage-system that benefits from "limited liability" like any other corporation. Using this principle, RTMark supports the sabotage (informative alternation) of corporate products, from dolls and children's learning tools to electronic action games, by channeling funds from investors to workers. RTMark searches for solutions that go beyond public relations and defines its "bottom line" in improving culture. It seeks cultural and not financial profit.

Strategies and Policies

RTMark is engaged in a whole lot of projects, which are designed to lead to a positive social change. Projects with roughly similar intent, risk, or likelihood of accomplishment are grouped into "fund families", like for example "The Frontier Fund". This fund is dedicated to challenge naive, utopic visions of the "global village", focusing on the implications of allowing corporations and other multinational interests to operate free of social context.

RTMark pursues its projects through donations by individuals, which can invest in a certain fund, whereby an exact specification of how the donated money should be used can be made. RTMark has repeatedly gained attention through its projects, especially with its spoof websites, like the ones of Rudy Giuliani and the WTO, or its campaign against eToys, which prevents the Internet art group etoy from using the domain etoy.com.

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Advertising and the Content Industry - The Coca-Cola Case

Attempts to dictate their rules to the media has become a common practice among marketers and the advertising industry. Similar as in the Chrysler case, where the company demanded that magazines give advance notice about controversial articles, recent attempts to put pressure on content providers have been pursued by the Coca-Cola Company.

According to a memo published by the New York Post, Coca-Cola demands a free ad from any publication that publishes a Coke ad adjacent to stories on religion, politics, disease, sex, food, drugs, environmental issues, health, or stories that employ vulgar language. "Inappropriate editorial matter" will result in the publisher being liable for a "full make good," said the memo by Coke advertising agency McCann-Erickson. Asked about this practice, a Coke spokes person said the policy has long been in effect.

(Source: Odwyerpr.com: Coke Dictates nearby Editorial. http://www.odwyerpr.com)

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World Wide Web (WWW)

Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Java applets, so making multimedia content possible.

Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it.

Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too.

According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000.

World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html

http://www.searchwords.com/
http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...
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Java Applets

Java applets are small programs that can be sent along with a Web page to a user. Java applets can perform interactive animations, immediate calculations, or other simple tasks without having to send a user request back to the server. They are written in Java, a platform-independent computer language, which was invented by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Source: Whatis.com

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Kessler Marketing Intelligence (KMI)

KMI is the leading source for information on fiber-optics markets. It offers market research, strategic analysis and product planning services to the opto-electronics and communications industries. KMI tracks the worldwide fiber-optic cable system and sells the findings to the industry. KMI says that every fiber-optics corporation with a need for strategic market planning is a subscriber to their services.

http://www.kmicorp.com/

http://www.kmicorp.com/
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Bandwidth

The bandwidth of a transmitted communications signal is a measure of the range of frequencies the signal occupies. The term is also used in reference to the frequency-response characteristics of a communications receiving system. All transmitted signals, whether analog or digital, have a certain bandwidth. The same is true of receiving systems.

Generally speaking, bandwidth is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. In a qualitative sense, bandwidth is proportional to the complexity of the data for a given level of system performance. For example, it takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second. Large sound files, computer programs, and animated videos require still more bandwidth for acceptable system performance. Virtual reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all.

In digital systems, bandwidth is data speed in bits per second (bps).

Source: Whatis.com

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Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)

DSL connections are high-speed data connections over copper wire telephone lines. As with cable connections, with DSL you can look up information on the Internet and make a phone call at the same time but you do not need to have a new or additional cable or line installed. One of the most prominent DSL services is ISDN (integrated services digital network, for more information click here ( http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/4/0,5716,129614+15,00.html )).

http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/4/0...
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Local Area Network (LAN)

A Local Area Network is an office network, a network restricted to a building area.

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Writing

Writing and calculating came into being at about the same time. The first pictographs carved into clay tablets are used for administrative purposes. As an instrument for the administrative bodies of early empires, who began to rely on the collection, storage, processing and transmission of data, the skill of writing was restricted to a few. Being more or less separated tasks, writing and calculating converge in today's computers.

Letters are invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent, says Saint Augustine. The invention of writing made it possible to transmit and store information. No longer the ear predominates; face-to-face communication becomes more and more obsolete for administration and bureaucracy. Standardization and centralization become the constituents of high culture and vast empires as Sumer and China.

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The World Wide Web History Project

The ongoing World Wide Web History Project was established to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking. As primary research methods are used archival research and the analysis of interviews and talks with pioneers of the World Wide Web. As result a vast of collection of historic video, audio, documents, and software is expected. The project's digital archive is currently under development.

http://www.webhistory.org/home.html

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Electronic Messaging (E-Mail)

Electronic messages are transmitted and received by computers through a network. By E-Mail texts, images, sounds and videos can be sent to single users or simultaneously to a group of users. Now texts can be sent and read without having them printed.

E-Mail is one of the most popular and important services on the Internet.

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Chrysler Corporation

American automotive company first incorporated in 1925 and reorganized and newly incorporated in 1986. It has long been the third largest automaker in the United States (after General Motors and the Ford Motor Company). Founded by Walter P. Chrysler, it took over the business and properties of Maxwell Motor Company, Inc. (first formed in 1913). Today its major subsidiaries include Chrysler Automotive Operations, Inc., which manufactures Plymouth, Dodge, and Chrysler passenger cars, Dodge trucks, and auto parts and accessories; and the Chrysler Financial Corporation. Headquarters are in Highland Park, Mich., U.S.

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Server

A server is program, not a computer, as it sometimes said, dedicated to store files, manage printers and network traffic, or process database queries.

Web sites, the nodes of the World Wide Web (WWW), e.g., are stored on servers.

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