Sunday, February 20, 2005
Their Story
I began my quest with a prologue but I feel I need a preface as well. Why choose About.com as a modern version of the encyclopedia? In part I believe that About.com offers an edited view to the otherwise untamed and wild, worldwide web. It perhaps will offer a shortcut to sifting through a lot of dead and superfluous links. The web itself is like infinite volumes of encyclopedias whose pages have been ripped out and scattered by the wind. Add to the confusion the pages of a multitude of magazines and newspapers and even countless letters that people have written to each other. In About.com some of the more substantial chunks of the infinite matter of the cyberverse is reviewed and catalogued--as far as I know. The scope is as wide as one might have any need for, but focused in a meaningful and useful way.
So, I start with the Index Page which leads me to my first link:
Our Story (About.com)
The first interesting point I find is that About.com acts as an information resource managed by "a powerful network of 475 Guides -- smart, passionate, accomplished people who are experts in their field." Wow, this is certainly no Google search engine. This is the sort of thing I was expecting.
About.com covers 50,000+ topics! Uh-oh, this may be an endless quest! It includes a "robust library" of almost one million (and growing, I'm sure) pieces of original content. Ok, this is going to be an endless quest. But it seems to be exactly what I was looking for.
