ON TECHNOLOGY

The World Wide Web, the current hot Internet application, is so-named because information at any given location can form connections to other sites.

The end result is supposed to be a web, a giant linking of volumes of text, video and audio clips, but in practice it turns out to be more like a haystack: a huge mess in which it is next to impossible to find even one needle.

Two years ago, when the web was in its infancy, it was composed mainly of computer science departments and academic databases. As any average Internet user has discovered, many companies quickly mounted sites to establish an on-line presence, but in their haste failed to provide truly interesting or unique information.

If you are interested in a product, you can guess at what the web address might be--most likely something like http://www.companyname.com--and see if it exists. If that doesn't work, you can try connecting to a site which can search the web for you. http://www.lycos.com and http://www.infoseek.com are good ones to try.

If you would rather search for information in a top-down fashion, first deciding on a category (like science), and then being provided with all the web's available options, try a web database like http://www.yahoo.com.

Although advertising is the financial factor driving companies' moves to put information on the web, the most useful sites deliberately move away from this model and instead provide a service you might pay for in the real world.

Publishing is the industry which is most easily moved to the web, and thus the sites of publishing companies tend to be the most useful.

Since most publishers are just interested in collecting data on how their sites are used, access tends to be free, so there are few barriers to roaming news on the web, other than filling in the occasional registration page.

And surfing can be fun, although you may feel somewhat news-satiated when you are done.

A quick survey yesterday afternoon turned up more than a dozen different sites that had multi-page analyses of the O.J. Simpson verdict, complete with text and sound and video clips.

Most of the wire services are available on-line. A variety of services, from the Associated Press to ITAR-TASS, are available at http://www.trib.com.

So: Newspapers like the San Fransisco Examine are making their full texts available for free. On the national stage, USA Today is updated throughout the day at: http://www.usatoday.com.

The New York Times is planning to go on-line this fall at http://www.nytimes.com and currently puts up the eight-page Times Fax at http://www.nytimesfax.com, albeit in Adobe Acrobat, a format somewhat awkward to download and read.

The Wall Street Journal puts up its "Money and Investing Update" section in a splashy display each day, but unless you are interested in business, it may not prove too interesting.

Time Warner has made a determined effort to mount its magazines: Time, Life, People, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and the company's lesser-known publications are all up at http://www.pathfinder.com.

Television news programs are producing net renditions of themselves as well. CN leads the pack, with "CNN Interactive" at http://www.cnn.com.