1. The Need of New Approaches - Kritische Stimmen zur ...

Chapter 9: The Thought Experiment
The Various Types of Internet Appearance
For each entry a short characterization of the Internet site is given. Here only 4 types of Internet appearance are
recognized, these covering the span from the simplest to the most complex conceptions:
(1) The home page or the Weblog (blog) of a single person or corporate body, the main content of which is the
person’s or body’s own messages.
(2) The portal, operated by a person or corporate body, in order to present the messages and work of several
contributors, and giving a certain width of topics and positions.
(3) The collection with thematic objectives, such as a magazine, an encyclopaedia or the like, that is supported
by firms, groups or associations.
(4) The forum or discussion group, in which certain topics are openly discussed and every visitor has the
possibility to participate under various conditions (anonymously, identified; unregistered, registered; with or
without a moderator). The operator and organizer can be a single person, a group or a corporate body.
The allocation of the Internet sites to one of these types is not always an easy matter, though this is of no
dogmatic significance since the allocation does not determine the principle of organization but is only used as a
characterizing attribute.
The Problem of the URL Proof
For practical reasons, details on the Web address (URL) are restricted to the last-known, shortest base address.
The first presentation of the documentation in December 2003 meanwhile lies 5 years in the past, and the present
overview will have to remain unrevised for some years to come. This means that the overview will extend over an
almost ten-year period of Internet development in which many addresses will be, or will have been, altered or
deleted, some content being presented under completely new addresses, in forums that put the old topics in the
archives, or even delete them. For a “later” reader, what is then available is more or less restricted to what he or she
can find on the website and what the general search engines can still detect, possibly only in the cache of the search
engine.
For this reason the description of the Internet sites will contain only the essential details with which one can
usually also find the sites and the topics via the international or local search engines.
The Selection of Internet Sites
The selection includes only Internet sites that at least treat one publication of the GOM project at substantial
length. Simple mentions made of the publications in texts, literature lists and link lists remain unconsidered; these
can be found at any time with the help of the search engines. With respect to such searches, however, it should be
said that the citations in the Internet often only offer fragmentary information on a cited work, such as the title, or
the names of the authors and sometimes not even that, but only the link to a download source.
The extent of the descriptions of the Internet sites is variable and is kept to a necessary minimum that suffices to
find the sites or topics. For forums and discussion groups the topics with starting date and precise heading are
therefore given.
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G. O. Mueller: STR 2012