The site that I have chosen is the PointCast Network.
I personally tried this program and I have seen what it means and how it
deals with media.
It's impressive how successful a simple idea can be. The concept behind the
Pointcast Network lies in a few single ideas: a new way of displaying
information, a new way of getting information, a very effective way of
offering the product.
The idea of having the program showing news headlines as a screensaver is
just great. This way we don't have to actively look for news in a certain
site. We already had things like personalized news, which let the users
select and determine certain parameters for the news to be retrieved, but
what's new here is that it is not us looking for information, but the
information is coming at us and is continuously displaying on our screen
with the headlines cycling through a variety of news. And to start it all we
don't have to do anything. The screensaver automatically downloads the news
at customizable intervals so that we always have updated news.
And to make it all profitable and at the same time appealing to users, they
have used advertisement, which is becoming increasingly common on the
internet. On the window that displays the headlines a little space is
devoted to the continuous running of commercial advertising. The whole area
is of course clickable so that it doesn't take a user a lot of effort to
obtain more information about products being advertised.
I think that the PointCast Network is definitely a new and great way to
present information to the user.
Daniele De Francesco
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Daniele De Francesco qq7te@mit.edu
362 Memorial Drive http://daniele.mit.edu
Cambridge, MA 02139 ftp://daniele.mit.edu
USA (617) 225-7117
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