1.0. Mission Statement. This gopherspace serves three purposes: 1) it is the underground warren for a gopher landing zone on the Web, 2) it acts as a secondary venue for existing avocational activities in communications and public risk management, and 3) it facilitates the gophermaster's independent study of this excellent little tool. 2.0. Analysis Gopher emerged during the rapid evolution of computer networking just prior to maturation of the World Wide Web. Like any good tool, the Internet has an associated knife edge of reality. Its potential to educate, inform and empower is legend. However, along with this positive capability has come a dark side. Privacy and security concerns, commercialization, hacking, adverse risk to minors, and infrastructure threats, vulnerabilities and exploits are among the current concerns. In retrospect, gopher's relative simplicity and more rigid structure arguably are now among its greatest appeals. In the Web environment, it often seems that far more time and energy are spent on packaging, presenting and marketing information, than on developing unique content or improving its quality. In the gopher environment, packaging and presentation are minimal, and marketing is almost non-existent - content withstands public scrutiny and receives standing based on its own merits. Since gopher emphasizes content and its access, resource maintainers can focus on generating and improving that content. Moreover, because gopher addresses only the essentials, it tends to be a "lowest common denominator" communications tool. This realization means it could find application in a wide variety of communication contexts, ranging from "deprecated anachronisms" to "contemporary essentials." Gopher could be used in both wireline and wireless mediums. Example applications include landline BBSes, Ham radio PBBSes, MURS, USENET moderated newsgroups (and other online forums), Web gateways, SMS (cell phone texting), emergency alert systems and U-NII (the wireless component of the Internet). However, the possible use of gopher for new applications presents some drawbacks. The explosive popularity of the Web has greatly diminished interest in the "primitive" realm of gopher. As a result, available content and the number of gopher servers has decreased to almost zero. Moreover, these factors feed on each other in a negative spiral that dissolves into historical entropy. (The same situation applies to some of the example applications cited above - a de facto family of "deprecated anachronisms.") Although a full revivification of gopher is highly unlikely, any contemporary attempt to constructively use it will have to immediately address the need for CONTENT and VISIBILITY. It will also have to do so in a manner that overcomes the drag factors described above, or else the project simply won't fly. Yours truly is highly receptive to producing both CONTENT and VISIBILITY. Collaboration is welcome! ---------------------------------------------------------------- Contact and Status Please direct feedback concerning this gopherspace or this document to the resource maintainer: Send site/document feedback to the gophermaster Thanks! Lee's Gopherspace at SDF and EPDR Net Outpost 4a You are viewing: gopher://sdf.lonestar.org/hh/users/tac4si/about.html Document owner: Lee Knoper Page last modified: 2006 UTC / 29 May 2008 This site is graciously hosted by SDF Super Dimensional Fortress