Push Technology Essay -- Technology

Five thousand years ago, with the invention of writing, the human species took its first jump towards a technological civilization. The second one came only in the last half of the XV century, with the invention of press, by Gutenberg. The possibility of reproducing thousands of identical copies of the same document has taken to the creation of the first magazines and journals, a revolutionary concept. But this occurred in a slow and grad way: the first scientific journal pressed, for example, was released just in 1665, 200 years after. Although, until today this is the basis of a huge system of divulgation in science and technology, counting more than 300 thousand journals around the world, and that has changed little during the three last centuries. Nowadays, this scenario is about to change radically, with the development of global computer networks, like Internet, mainly after the explosion of the WWW (World Wide Web), that allows for high quality electronic publishing, with texts, images, videos, etc. Together, these two technologies have a revolutionary potential many times superior than the invention of press. WWW is based in an active model of search for information, this is, in traditional Internet navigation, denominated "pull" technology, the user obtains information from different WWW sites, searching for topics of his interest. The huge volume of documents and sites available make the information obtention possible only after a refined search procedure, made with one of the mechanisms existent for this purpose, making the process difficult. Besides that, the continuous growth of available information and the necessity of individually visiting the sites is, slowly, making access infeasible, both from the user's... ...t with the certainty that the information is delivered to the correct user and according do a desired profile. In the near future, the integration of "push" technology with traditional media like television, cinema and radio will be possible, changing radically not only the mass media, but also business and marketing strategies involved. Finally, the use of information technologies based in Artificial Intelligence will be used to improve information filters both in client and server side, in a manner that software robots and other autonomous agents will send the subscriber's computer only news and articles that satisfy highly specific interests criteries. Electronic references PointCast Corporation: http://www.pointcast.com Marimba Corporation: http://www.marimba.com Microsoft Corporation: http://www.microsoft.com Push Council: http://www.aitek.com/PUSH/