Balancing policy, strategy, and technology

Citation

Schwartz, D. (1999), "Balancing policy, strategy, and technology", Internet Research, Vol. 9 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.1999.17209baa.001

Balancing policy, strategy, and technology

Balancing policy, strategy, and technology

Welcome to another issue of Internet Research ­ an issue that presents a balance of papers that does a good job in reflecting the dual focus of what the Journal has come to offer.

The first half of this issue presents four papers on organizational, business, social, and design issues. The papers by Strader and Shaw and by Pardun and Lamb share common ground in that they both deal with how this Internet is changing traditional business activities, the former in terms of consumer behavior, and the latter in terms of vendor behavior with respect to advertising strategy.

Keenan and Trotter's paper on the changing role of community networks focusses on the Internet's "coming of age", documenting the decline of the Freenet network and presenting how the Canadian government used the Freenet model to boost the growth of Internet use in Canada. The Freenet model, anachronistic in the commercial-age of the Internet, is abundantly relevant in developing countries where its use should be considered as part of a national Internet strategy.

The paper by Nel et al. deals with an increasingly troublesome issue ­ how can we objectively measure "good" Web site design? They present the adaptation of a flow model and empirical study showing how the concept of "flow" can be used to better design Web sites.

The second half presents more technically oriented papers that deal with a number of the constantly developing issues surrounding Internet search. Spink et al. present one of the first large scale studies of search engine log data and develop some important insights regarding search strategy and successive search behavior.

Following Spink et al.'s paper, we have two articles presenting two very different approaches to improving search performance. Ho and Goh present the Jamaica project with a focus on client-based end-user profiling. Loke et al., take a knowledge-based approach in developing information agents that can be simply programmed to cover different domains of knowledge.

Finally, we close with a paper by Watters and Patel that addresses the issue of machine translation and its potential influence on cross-cultural and multinational Internet usage. While machine translation research is in its third decade, with the growth of the Internet it has received new impetus and a fertile testing ground.

Before signing off on this issue, there is one more bit of news to share with you. Eileen Breen of MCB University Press, Managing Editor of Internet Research, is moving on to other projects within MCB. The production of an academic journal is a joint effort between the Editor who handles the content and direction of the journal, and the publisher's Managing Editor who handles all of the day-to-day production issues in getting the journal out the door and into the hands of our readers. As Managing Editor of Internet Research, Eileen has helped me into my role as editor and made the whole process an enjoyable experience. I would like to thank her for her efforts and wish her the best of luck in her new position. At the same time, I welcome aboard Jenny Pickles who will be taking over as the journal's Managing Editor. Jenny has several years of experience with MCB on a number of their other journals. I look forward to working with Jenny in developing the Journal, as we continue to bring to you insightful and thought-provoking issues of Internet Research.

David Schwartz