The rain never satisfies everybody The first message was received with amazement by many and some disappointment by others. “Please don’t send any more Christmas cards. Your personal data has been included in the http://happychristmas.english.fest. page (*). Visit this page, look for your name, add the list of people you would like to wish a […]

To remember is to regress, and what one has experienced, live it again If it’s December in Barcelona, it’s time for Cornella and the Internet. For the fifth consecutive year, our friend Alfons made this month a must for a dozen or so of us to publicly reflect on the future of the Internet ….. […]

Build the enemy who flees a bridge of silver The debate on the effects of globalisation, which is becoming more and more radical and not always very clear, is attracting a strange bunch of disciples and detractors. Last month in Seattle, at one of the world’s most important annual computer conferences, Bill Gates, president of […]

He who has a house of straw, fears fire Is journalism in a state of crisis? If we take into account what experts and representatives of the sector are saying at the conferences and congresses that abound at the moment, the answer is a definite yes. From the media being increasingly concentrated in the hands […]

Those who take too much, don’t get much done Mark Hinojosa is Associate Managing Editor of the Chicago Tribune. Founded in 1849, it is one of the US’ most prestigious newspapers. Mark is a great believer in “media convergence”, the new job definition of journalists in the electronic age. The idea is that journalists should […]

Those who don’t go for a swim, don’t drown in the sea The European Union has a plan for arresting present US domination in the networked world which they hope to have up and running by March 2001. The so-called eContent programme of the Directorate General of the Information Society plans, in the first place, […]

An “able” generation can attain what centuries without one could not José Ortega y Gasset This week the International Congress “Arte, educación y sociedad en Ortega y Gasset” (1883-195,5) (“Art, Education and Society in Ortega y Gasset” (1883-1955) is being held in Madrid to commemorate the 70th aniversary of the publication of three fundamental works […]

Everything is difficult before it becomes easy The First Global Congress of Community Networks(Global CN 2000) brought a colourful and varied multitude of people from all over the planet to Barcelona. The meeting turned out to be one of the most fascinating exercises the Internet has to offer these days, namely showing us that the […]

Learn young, learn fair When Ramana Rao displayed Yahoo on screen to participants at enredando’s I One Day Conference, it brought home very clearly to us all that the road to information management is a long and winding one – and that the journey has only just begun. Ramana, Inxight’s energetic and cultured vice-president, had […]

Those that want to kiss her, will look for her face en.red.ando’s I One Day Conference, which will be taking a look at Next Generation Information Technology, is being held in Barcelona this Friday 27 October. It is a unique meeting both as far as its subject matter and the circumstances under which it is […]

I took in the mouse in my hole and it became heir Recent protests in Seattle, Washington and Prague against the process of globalisation, in general, and the policies of international financial and commercial organisations in particular, demonstrate how much the Internet has been revitalised as an instrument of social change. Ironically enough, the most […]

The degree of interest knows no limits Five years ago, when the Web was just starting to make its public appearance, a company began to distribute a free newspaper on the underground in Stockholm. Not long after further editions were launched in Göteborg and Malmö. Today it is the most widely read newspaper in Sweden. […]

Love conquers all in the face of all odds In the previous editorial (see “The Virtual Super-tutor”) we said that in the field of education “creating an Internet curriculum is a job waiting to be done”. Who the main players for getting such a task underway should be, is another matter still to be decided. […]

If you want to be wise, buy an old man I have just come back from taking part in Inforensino 2000, the highly interesting IV Jornadas de Informática Aplicada a la Educación (IV Workshop on Computer Science Applied to Education) held in the Spanish city of Lugo. Unfortunately, to a large extent it resembled other […]

Firefighters don’t stand on each others hoses en.red.ando¹s Masters in Digital Communication was launched at respective ceremonies in Madrid and Barcelona last week. It will be imparted in Spanish via the Internet as from November. After a long period of preparation, we have designed a course which we hope brings together all the accumulated experience […]

You don’t know anything until others know you know The world’s three major cell phone manufacturers have agreed to label their devices according to radiation emission levels. So when we use mobile phones from now on we will know how large the electromagnetic field transmitted to our bodies is. Whether the gadget fries our neurons […]

The devil lurks behind the cross We shouldn’t be surprised if, very shortly, someone – an expert on the environment, for instance – gets a message that goes something like this, “We have detected that there is insufficient information online about decision-making related to crises caused by catastrophes in densely populated areas. You are an […]

Don’t believe the person who is coming from the fair, but the one who is going back to it The Net is about to turn into what is, in reality, artificial nature, with all the complexities that one would expect from an environment of that kind. This means a nature composed of electronic habitats which […]

People who stand still don’t go anywhere Ants have been with us for 80 million years. Theirs is the story of the colony and colonisation’s unstoppable race for success. Their 10,000 species have populated almost every corner of the earth. Only some icy regions of the planet and an island or two have escaped them. […]

When you ask for something, make sure you ask for a lot This summer’s big news event so far, apart from the tragedy of the nuclear submarine “Kursk”, took place in Maguncia, Germany, where a group of people, skilfully manipulated by the German government, managed to pay a billion and a half more than they […]

Words are but wind, but seeing is believing The Internet ranks already as the world’s 18th economic power after Switzerland and before Argentina. The two most thorough studies of the “New Net Economy” so far, the first by the University of Texas —Measuring the Internet Economy— and the second by the OECD —Outlook 2000 on […]

Nobody can see what you know, but everyone can see what you do Since its foundation in 1996, en.red.ando has defined itself as a magazine dedicated to reflecting on the changes brought about by the Internet. For a good deal of this time, our task has been shared with a large group of contributors who […]

Things are all in a muddle: the nettles mixed with the roses Plans to further expand the EU to include Eastern European countries will create a political, economic and social space where there will be 22 languages spoken. How will this affect the development of the Internet on a European scale? Will we be able […]

And the donkey goes back to the wheat The 53rd World Newspaper Congress, held a couple of weeks ago in Rio de Janeiro, was an excellent showcase for viewing the effects the irruption of the Internet has had on the media, dubbed “traditional” ever since. In the almost five years that the Web has been […]

Abundance, like want, ruins many Junk information is still on the increase at an exponential and uncontrolled rate. It is repetitive, redundant, excessive and hyper-abundant and, despite the insistence of many gurus, is not confined to the Internet. Let’s take the TV and traditional media for example. For quite some time now a new TV […]

Jobs come running and leave at a walking pace While on the most visible surface of the Net some companies give the impression that without thousands of millions in investment a portal is not worth anything at all and is, thus, superfluous, below the surface, the Internet economy is simmering and the pot is boiling […]

Never say it will rain until you hear the thunder Everyone knows that the Internet bubble is bound to burst sooner or later. Increase in speculative capital, the carcasses floating around trying to become “the best site in the world, where users can find anything and everything”, plus labour inflation on many of these new […]

A lover moves faster than a hundred lawyers Just as in palaeontology, there are many ways of interpreting Internet strata, particularly those layers accumulated over the last five years since the Web was popularised and the digital swamp was invaded by numerous active species. One of these is the “Tell me who was in the […]

The eye is a great deceiver Computer viruses are showing us just how close we are to one another on the Net. Someone lets one of them loose in the Philippines, Israel or California and, if it’s well-designed, in just a few hours it spreads over half the planet. In so doing it not only […]

He who knows the way home has no need to ask passers-by This week sees the start of en.jornad@, the online phase of the I en.red.ando One-Day Conference to be held in Barcelona on the 27 October this year. Over almost four months we will be debating and researching the next generation information technologies to […]

The fool thought he had friends when they were really just after his wine Big Brothers are multiplying as fast as mushrooms in the wet season. And I am not referring to any recent television experiences that have aroused the watchman in all of us, but rather to real assaults on our privacy which place […]

Money talks As a friend of mine often says, we can’t complain because we are very lucky to be living in a very exciting era full of changes and transformations which, unlike other times, are directly affecting us all, either actively or passively. We have seen an empire which seemed eternal dissolving before our very […]

One grain does not fill a silo, but it helps its companion Someone knocks on your door and it’s a total stranger who says, “Hello I’m Australian. My cousin such and such travelled with a girl who was married to Tom, who knows someone who studied with Dick, who is, I believe, a good friend […]

Old ox means a straight furrow Vinai Dishpande is not a name that usually hits the headlines in the West. Perhaps he has never made them, in fact. Nevertheless, in India he is a kind of Bill Gates. He is the father of the equivalent of Silicon Valley in this Asian country. A Stanford-educated engineer, […]

He who does not go to my house, kicks me out of his The Information Society is beginning to show signs of maturing. As we have said before, proof of the Internet’s social impact will come when it emerges from its computerised cloister and moves beyond its strictly technological environment. Something of this kind has […]

The obtuse man becomes sharper with use Exactly who is doing research into communication and information systems and training in the Net these days? Where has the sudden explosion of innovations sweeping the Internet come from? One thing certain is that they are not coming from the universities where the Internet itself originated. Ironically, advances […]

Those that leave the road for the side path think they they are advancing, but they are really taking the long way round. The European Union’s Lisbon summit has focused more than ever before on information technology. EU leaders, apparently tired of repeatedly hearing, particularly in their Gross National Products and balance of payments reports, […]

No day passes without some grief The predominant role of telecommunication operators in the “new economy” is so overpowering at the moment that it is difficult to imagine the virtual landscape without them. The enormous investment of companies such as Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, ATT, MCI or Worldcom, to name but a few, in […]

Wood that is used for wooden pegs cannot be polished “This is all totally crazy”, “the bubble’s going to burst soon”, “the market’s gone mad”, “look at what’s happening in the US already”. These are just some of the things people are saying about the Internet these days. The constant flow of thousands of millions […]

When it rains the water flows On the Internet you can’t stand still in the same place for two minutes, but sometimes it really makes one take surprising leaps and bounds. Over the last few weeks, Enredando.com, the company that publishes en.red.ando and promotes the projects that, one way or the other, we have been […]

He who buys dear, sells cheap Nowadays, when it appears that all of the Internet, or rather the whole of the virtual world is being gobbled up by telecommunications operators, banks, large commercial concerns and powerful capital risk enterprises, we feel that we should ask ourselves, “Is there anybody else out there?” Yes, of course, […]

All fruit gets ripe except the “pear-haps” The message of present US economic success has never got through to Europe so loud and clear as at Davos. Clinton himself, at the head of practically his entire economic policy team, summed up their recipe for success in an apparently simple sentence: Alan Greenspan had realised the […]

Scratch your leg when your your head aches Things change so fast on the Internet that sometimes they don’t give one time to write about what one wants. I’m supposed to be following up on the subject of the relationship between the local and the global in new businesses on the Net. And we will […]

No-one gets fat by just licking Today we are going to contemplate our own navels. In other words, we are going to talk about ourselves a bit. Exactly one year ago, after many a sleepless night and years of preparation, we finally got en.medi@, a conceptual technology developed by Enredando.com, S.L., off the ground. Its […]

It’s the bait that ensnares, not the fisherman or his rod The exclusive World Economics Forum in Davos was even more exclusive than usual this year thanks, paradoxically enough, to globalisation. Following in the wake of the last World Trade Summit, this Swiss Alpine resort filled up with protesters wanting to remind the captains of […]

Health is not contagious Despite the jubilation that accompanies all mergers of industrial giants, there are some that are more important than others. And what matters most is not the astronomical sums they entail, but something much more basic and mundane, namely, our perception of the world we live in. The media had a field […]

There’s no heaven without clouds, no paradise without its serpent The latest big merger of this turn of the century, AOL’s mega-bite of Time Warner, has brought to the surface of our society the most mature vision of industrial culture so far. Viewed with a certain tragic nostalgia by the media, the fusion of these […]

Spin that top on your fingernail (if you can) On the same day as the biggest merger in history, between AOL and Time Warner, en.red.ando enters its fifth year. Not that the one has anything to do with the other, but you never know. Only time will tell. The truth is that on 8 January […]

He who buys an umbrella when it rains, pays nine when it’s only worth six Well, can you believe it ! Here I am writing the first article of the year 2000, on a computer, and it will be published and read on the Internet. Only five years ago few people would have invested the […]