Extracts from "Bluff your way on the Internet"

Here we present two extracts from Bluff Your Way on the Internet by Rob Ainsley, which is in the shops now. The first of these is on Sex on the Internet (which will finally give those people who use the Ariadne search facility to search for "sex" a hit); the second of these describe the foolproof way to be a budding minotaur.

ex on the Internet:

Far and away the most accessed sites on the Internet are those related to sex. This is a classic illustration of the saying:
"Those that can, do."
"Those that can't, teach."
"Those that can't teach, put up articles about it on the Internet."

There are newsgroups, picture galleries and how-to articles for every orientation, desire, fantasy and fetish possible. And several for those that aren't, which goes to show how sophisticated those photo-retouching programs are these days. The content of all sites is the same. To get hold of it you have to wait a very long time, and when it does arrive it's disappointing and extremely short. Rather, come to think of it, like...

Sex stories are best avoided, because whatever bizarre and outlandish things you claim to have seen in a newsgroup or pornographic site you have made up, someone else really will have seen something even more bizarre and outlandish. Besides which you might be thought to fall into the fourth category of the saying:
"Those that can't even put up articles about it on the Internet, browse other people's."

Internet Sex's Great Paradox Sex-related newsgroups, in stark contrast to all other areas of the Internet, apparently have plenty of uninhibited women willing to engage in intimate e-mail correspondence with eager men. However, on the Internet, it is impossible to tell genders, and pranksters abound. The more forthcoming the 'woman', the more likely it is to be a man.

Web pages - How to criticise them:

You can safely disparage any web page for any, or all, of the following reasons:

1. There are far too many graphics, which add nothing and take too long to load - a postcard-sized picture can often take up to a minute, the same time as a long chapter of a book.
2. There are not nearly enough graphics. Mere text by itself, no matter how quickly it loads in comparison, is boring; the whole reason for the Web is graphic ability.
3. The pages are too long. Anything more than a screenful is hard to read and requires scrolling. Information should be broken down into more, shorter, less weighty pages.
4. The pages are too short. If you have to keep clicking on hot links all the time, it is too easy to lose the thread. Information should be put together into fewer, longer, weightier pages.
5. The sound files are uncompressed. A minute of sound might take three minutes to load. All sound files should be compressed, using simple, readily available programs, to make them much smaller in size and hence far quicker to load.
6. The sound files are compressed. A minute of compressed sound might only take thirty seconds to load, but the reduction in quality because of compression will ruin the effect. All sound files should be uncompressed to make them actually worth listening to...

Contents Page - Electronic Libraries Programme and Project Information
Search Ariadne - Editorial for this issue - News desk - Reviews - Front Cover