Column 1

The Stages in Internet

First of all it should be a good idea to introduce myself. My name is Remco Sikkema (a.k.a. damiEn) and I'm 27 years old now (at least at the moment that I'm writing), I work for an ISP in Holland as a sales representative. I don't think you have ever read a column of me, well it wouldn't be possible because I never wrote one before. So what will I write about ? I don't have the slightest clue. It won't be a daily, weekly or monthly column, I just write one when I feel like it. Why do I want to write columns ? I don't have the slightest clue either, it is just that I got so many things on my mind that I would like to get that of my chest, that's a good reason I guess. As I said before I work for an ISP, I visit businesses and try to sell our products. We all know that this market (internet-solutions) is growing by day. I read somewhere that the percentage of businesses that have an internetconnection is about 10 %. So that leaves us 90 percent to conquer. I won't get into the details (tradesecrets), but I can tell you this, it is a very tough market. Because Internet is my work I spend a lot of time "online", it started in the beginning of 1997 when I plugged into the internet. Before that I was just a computerfreak playing games, but you hear so much of the new hype that I had to try it. And so I did. The first few steps on the internet where wierd, just fooling around with some URLs. Lucky for me my ISP has a great portalsite so I could wonder around very easy. I remember thinking :"Is this it !". But then came IRC, from that moment on my phonebill just went to huge proportions. You meet all kinds of people, you start programming in Pirch, you are getting e-mails from friends and all sorts of new information is coming your way. Isn't that wierd, it was not the surfing that really got me hooked on the internet, no chatting was the thing that really introduced me to the new hype. This went on for a year I think and then I started experimenting with my homepage, so I scrolled the Internet for all kinds of animation stuff and forgot all about IRC. To build a homepage takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, you try javascrips, some different pagebuilders, HTML editors and so on. After a few months I got fed up with that and just build a simple page with simple stuff, not because of the amount of time it took me but because it just loads faster. All that animation stuff and javascripts are making your page too slow and people just move on. For now I just have one problem, my page won't load in explorer. If you have any suggestions for that, e-mail me. (this problem is already solved, but thanks anyway :-> ...)
So we had my IRC-time and my homepage-time, there must be a next "-time". And there is, it's called the e-zines-time, I discovered the e-zines. There are so many of them but each of them is different, they come in different timelaps some by e-mail, some only online. I think I read about 15 different e-zines a week. And my eyes were opened, the amount of great sites I got from the e-zines is huge. You just can't get all the information by surfing, the e-zines point you in the direction you would like to go. Of course there is an overload of information but it's your choice to pick the information you like. Before the e-zines I was always the last to visit the sites that were "in", I was the last to hear about a hype. I got the URLs by e-mail (or ICQ) from friends and I thought, "how the hell do they know those sites", but now I know. Now I can send the hyped URLs and it feels good. But it does not mean you have all the relevant information you need and then ofcourse you pick the searchengine. But searchengines is a whole new subject, I think one of my next columns will be about them. See, there is so much I want to write about, my head just pops at the moment. But I'm strong, I'll keep this first column short and have a good think about the next.
But sometimes I wonder, what will be the next "-time" ?

Remco Sikkema