Said Cailliau: "The Net is another world, potentially a dangerous place. You can harm people and you can get harmed, just like on the road. If you go through an education process before getting an account then you're better prepared to go out there.''

With all due respect to Cailliau, the Net is not another world; for the most part it is people in our world sitting at computers, reading and looking at images, and not much more. His analogy is a poor one, as irresponsibility and lack of skill which can be fatal for a driver obviously do not have the same impact when surfing the Web. Ideas cannot break your leg.

The suggestion that one needs to pass some sort of exam and then receive a licence in order surf the Web is absurd. Would Cailliau have us licence all reading and other media consumption?

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"CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology, and culture, publishing articles, interviews, event-scenes and reviews of key books." Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.

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"The Enigma Channel works in partnership with leading researchers from the fields of UFOs, Crop Circles, Earth Mysteries, Ancient Sites, Cosmology, The Paranormal, New Science, Religion and Politics to bring you some of the Best Selling video documentaries available in the world." Clips are in Quicktime format.

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I would encourage anyone who has an interest in building the Web to examine how other things are built, and built to last. The term "information architecture" is thrown around a lot these days, and for some months now I have been reading about physical architecture as a counter-point to my own efforts. A recent discussion on Penn State's basic and applied design listserv concerning the failure of moderistic notions of archtiecture has been quite interesting.

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D. L. Ashliman, Incest in Indo-European Folktales: "Once there was a king who had a beautiful golden-haired wife. She fell ill, and--realizing that she soon would die--made her husband promise that after her death he would marry no one who was not as beautiful as she. When the time came for the king to remarry, he could find only one such woman in his kingdom: his own daughter. And he announced his intention to marry her... This is not a story of happiness and fulfillment, but rather one of coping and surviving. Countless generations from many nations must have responded to this tale of abuse in much the same manner as Alessandro Falassi's respondents in twentieth-century Italy: They did not like the story very much, but still they told it..."

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Annoyed: I visited one of my regular Web sites today and some sort of JavaScript/CSS layer advertisement, for what looks to be a wretched movie from Arnold Schwarzenegger, popped up to cover some of the text I was reading. When I clicked on the word "close" it actually sent me to the End of Days Web site; I guess the imagemap wasn't quite lined up right, or that was on purpose. I hope this isn't the beginning of a trend.

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My edge architecture list told me about an interesting article from MIT's Technology Review called "Interfaces: The Century's Top 10." Deborah Kreuze and the editors of TR suggest the ten best technologies of communication between human and machines which "convey information so elegantly that we hardly think about the power they give us."

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Given how many books are constantly being produced about Web production of various kinds, it's wonderful to come across something which is actually unique: Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. Philip is Philip Greenspun. founder of open source content management system Ars Digita. Alex is Philip's dog, and both are pictured on the book's cover. Look at Greenspun's take on server operating systems in chapter 8. Never have I read such an honest and useful real-world contextualization of Windows NT and UNIX. It's a wonderful breath of fresh air, and very typical of the book as a whole. Mixed in with this technical and management wisdom are wonderful photographs by the author which seem to remind us why on earth we work and publish in the first place.

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These have been busy weeks, and books pile up beside my bed.

From just looking at the cover of Phil Patton's Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51 one might think this another cutesy UFO book, but nothing could be further from the truth. Patton pulls the reader into a discourse of Cold War paranoia which has a lot more to do with Area 51 than Roswell.

Some years ago Erik Davis published an article on the mystical air surrounding the Internet which I cited in a paper on Innis, McLuhan, and Carey. Davis' article has since grown into Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. This is an airy read and skims across the surface of the new culture without decending into too much critical murk.

On the cover of Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler is a reproduction of a grainy sepia photograph of Hitler as a young child. The question is clear: can we conceive of him this way, imagine him as an innocent, this man who defines 20th century evil?

Most interesting so far is Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, the English publication of which strikes me as something of a landmark.

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The Secret Library of Scientology: A collection of texts about Scientology including Russell Miller's Bare-Faced Messiah and Jon Atack's A Piece of Blue Sky.