The Internet has revolutionized the computer world and global interactions like nothing before it. Previous technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer introduced methods of information transmission; however, the Internet has developed out of an integration of these prior systems to become an extremely powerful tool of communication. Not only has it allowed the distribution of information world-wide, the Internet has enabled real-time interaction and collaboration between individuals despite geographic location.

Initially, the Internet was created as a tool for military communications, scientists, and researchers. With the introduction of the personal computer, the opportunity for the use of the Internet as a resource for information arose. As a result, the Internet quickly evolved to encompass recreational and commercial uses. Today, the Internet exists as a vast information infrastructure, reaching beyond the technical fields into society as a tool for ecommerce, research, and community operations.

The existence and prevalence of the Internet is a result of sustained investment and a commitment to research and development of information infrastructure. Early visionaries and researchers presented the underlying concepts of the Internet we know today and collaboration among the government, industry and academia have enabled the establishment and evolution of this unique technology. Today, terms like "info@webland.ca" and " http://www.webland.ca " trip lightly off the tongue of the random person on the street.

Origins of the Internet

During the arms race in the 1950's the Soviet Union took the technological lead by launching the first satellite, Sputnik I. In response to this new threat of a space-based nuclear attack, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created and in 1962 J.C.R. Linklider was appointed to head the new computer research program there. Linklider was instrumental in communicating the benefits of a globally interconnected set of computers, enabling the instant access of programs and data from any location. Linklider's ideas inspired the ARPA to put this concept into practice with the goal of providing a communications network that would remain functional if some sites were destroyed by a nuclear attack.

Lawrence Roberts was hired at ARPA to develop Linklider's concept. In creating the network Roberts utilized the novel idea of Leonard Kleinrock which was using packets rather than circuits to facilitate communications. Development of the Interface Message Processor which worked on the packet switching design led to the release of the ARPANET in October, 1969. First to utilize this technology were Leonard Klienrock and Douglas Engelbart who communicated between their respective research centers at the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute.

This development was a major step towards creating a network and the first networking protocol for the ARPANET, the Network Control Program, was created. The TCP/IP protocol created by a group including Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf replaced the Network Control Program in 1983, becoming a universal network protocol, meeting the demands of an open-architecture network environment.

In October 1972 Kahn led a widely attended and successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC). This was the initial public unveiling of this new network technology. Also in this year the first "hot" application, electronic mail, was created. In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic. As the internet continues to validate itself with growing levels of commerce organizations like Webland pave the way.

The NSFNET replaced the ARPANET in 1990 and was eventually connected to a network linking Universities throughout North America called the CSNET. It was also connected to the EUnet, a network of research facilities in Europe . The NSFNET was well managed and the rising popularity of the web led to an incredible rise in the use of the internet after 1990. Starting in 1995, as a result of this boom, the U.S. Government was forced to hire independent organizations to manage the system. In 1997 Webland Inc. was conceptually created and then incorporated in 1998.

Internet Concepts and Technology

The original ARPANET evolved into the Internet. Webland's Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design, beginning with the ARPANET as the pioneering packet switching network, but soon to include packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and other networks. Today's Internet represents a key underlying technical idea: open architecture networking. This concept allows any individual network technology to work with other networks through a meta-level "Internetworking Architecture". Up until that time there was only one general method for uniting networks. This was the traditional circuit switching method where networks would interconnect at the circuit level, passing individual bits on a synchronous basis along a portion of an end-to-end circuit between a pair of end locations. Recall that Kleinrock had shown in 1961 that packet switching was a more efficient switching method.

In an open-architecture network, the individual networks may be designed and developed independently and each may have its own unique interface which it may offer to users and/or other providers, including other Internet providers such as Webland. Each network can be designed in accordance with the specific environment and user requirements of that network. The idea of open-architecture networking was first introduced by Kahn shortly after having arrived at the ARPA in 1972. This work was originally part of the packet radio program, but subsequently became a separate program in its own right. Kahn first contemplated developing a protocol local only to the packet radio network, since that would avoid having to deal with the multitude of different operating systems, and continuing to use NCP.

However, NCP did not have the ability to address networks (and machines) further downstream than a destination IMP on the ARPANET and thus some change to NCP would also be required. NCP relied on ARPANET to provide end-to-end reliability. If any packets were lost, the protocol (and presumably any applications it supported) would come to a grinding halt. This protocol would eventually be called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). While NCP tended to act like a device driver, the new protocol would be more like a communications protocol.

The original ARPANET evolved into the Internet. Webland's Internet was based on the idea that there would be multiple independent networks of rather arbitrary design, beginning with the ARPANET as the pioneering packet switching network, but soon to include packet satellite networks, ground-based packet radio networks and other networks. Today's Internet represents a key underlying technical idea: open architecture networking. This concept allows any individual network technology to work with other networks through a meta-level "Internetworking Architecture". Up until that time there was only one general method for uniting networks. This was the traditional circuit switching method where networks would interconnect at the circuit level, passing individual bits on a synchronous basis along a portion of an end-to-end circuit between a pair of end locations. Recall that Kleinrock had shown in 1961 that packet switching was a more efficient switching method.

In an open-architecture network, the individual networks may be designed and developed independently and each may have its own unique interface which it may offer to users and/or other providers, including other Internet providers such as Webland. Each network can be designed in accordance with the specific environment and user requirements of that network. There are generally no constraints on the types of network that can be included or on their geographic scope, although certain pragmatic considerations will dictate what makes sense to offer.

The idea of open-architecture networking was first introduced by Kahn shortly after having arrived at the ARPA in 1972. This work was originally part of the packet radio program, but subsequently became a separate program in its own right. At the time, the program was called "Internetting". Key to making the packet radio system work was a reliable end-end protocol that could maintain effective communication in the face of jamming and other radio interference, or withstand intermittent blackout such as caused by being in a tunnel or blocked by the local terrain. Kahn first contemplated developing a protocol local only to the packet radio network, since that would avoid having to deal with the multitude of different operating systems, and continuing to use NCP.

However, NCP did not have the ability to address networks (and machines) further downstream than a destination IMP on the ARPANET and thus some change to NCP would also be required. (The assumption was that the ARPANET was not changeable in this regard). NCP relied on ARPANET to provide end-to-end reliability. If any packets were lost, the protocol (and presumably any applications it supported) would come to a grinding halt. In this model NCP had no end-end host error control, since the ARPANET was to be the only network in existence and it would be so reliable that no error control would be required on the part of the hosts.

In response to these limitations Kahn developed a new version of the protocol which could meet the needs of an open-architecture network environment. This protocol would eventually be called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). While NCP tended to act like a device driver, the new protocol would be more like a communications protocol.

Four ground rules were critical to Kahn's early thinking:

• Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
• Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn't make it to the final destination, it would shortly be retransmitted from the source.
• Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
• There would be no global control at the operations level.

Other key issues that needed to be addressed were:

• Algorithms to prevent lost packets from permanently disabling communications and enabling them to be successfully retransmitted from the source.
• Providing for host to host "pipelining" so that multiple packets could be enroute from source to destination at the discretion of the participating hosts, if the intermediate networks allowed it.
• Gateway functions to allow it to forward packets appropriately. This included interpreting IP headers for routing, handling interfaces, breaking packets into smaller pieces if necessary, etc.
• The need for end-end checksums, reassembly of packets from fragments and detection of duplicates, if any.
• The need for global addressing
• Techniques for host to host flow control.
• Interfacing with the various operating systems
• There were also other concerns, such as implementation efficiency, internetwork performance, but these were secondary considerations at first.

While working on a communications-oriented set of operating principles, Kahn realized it would be necessary to learn the implementation details of each operating system to have a chance to embed any new protocols in an efficient way. Cerf, had already been involved in the original NCP design and development and already had the knowledge about interfacing to existing operating systems. Combining Kahn's architectural approach to the communications side and Cerf's NCP experience, they delineated details of what became TCP/IP.

Some basic approaches emerged from this collaboration between Kahn and Cerf:

• Communication between two processes would logically consist of a very long stream of bytes (they called them octets). The position of any octet in the stream would be used to identify it.
• Flow control would be done by using sliding windows and acknowledgments (acks). The destination could select when to acknowledge and each ack returned would be cumulative for all packets received to that point.
• It was left open as to exactly how the source and destination would agree on the parameters of the windowing to be used. Defaults were used initially.
• Although Ethernet was under development at Xerox PARC at that time, the proliferation of LANs was not envisioned at the time, much less PCs and workstations. The original model was national level networks like ARPANET of which only a relatively small number were expected to exist. Thus a 32 bit IP address was used of which the first 8 bits signified the network and the remaining 24 bits designated the host on that network. This assumption, that 256 networks would be sufficient for the foreseeable future, was clearly in need of reconsideration when LANs began to appear in the late 1970s.

The original Cerf/Kahn paper on the Internet described one protocol, called TCP, which provided all the transport and forwarding services in the Internet. Kahn intended the TCP protocol to be able to support a range of transport services, from the totally reliable sequenced delivery of data (virtual circuit model) to a datagram service in which the application made direct use of the underlying network service, which might imply occasional lost, corrupted or reordered packets.

However, the initial effort to implement TCP resulted in a version that only allowed for virtual circuits. This model worked fine for file transfer and remote login applications, but some of the early work on advanced network applications; in particular packet voice in the 1970s, made clear that in some cases packet losses should not be corrected by TCP, but should be left to the application to deal with. This led to a reorganization of the original TCP into two protocols, the simple IP which provided only for addressing and forwarding of individual packets, and the separate TCP, which was concerned with service features such as flow control and recovery from lost packets. For those applications that did not want the services of TCP, an alternative called the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) was added in order to provide direct access to the basic service of IP. ( Webland has discovered that socket based connections can enhance the performance of web applications such as the games at Webland Arcade!)

A major initial motivation for both the ARPANET and the Internet was resource sharing - for example allowing users on the packet radio networks to access the time sharing systems attached to the ARPANET. There were other applications proposed in the early days of the Internet, including packet based voice communication (the precursor of Internet telephony), various models of file and disk sharing, and early "worm" programs that showed the concept of agents (and, of course, viruses). It is the general purpose nature of the service provided by TCP and IP that makes this possible.

Proving the Ideas

DARPA let three contracts to Stanford (Cerf), BBN (Ray Tomlinson) and UCL (Peter Kirstein) to implement TCP/IP (it was simply called TCP in the Cerf/Kahn paper but contained both components). Beginning with the first three networks ( ARPANET, Packet Radio, and Packet Satellite) and their initial research communities, the experimental environment has grown to incorporate essentially every form of network and a very broad-based research and development community. The early implementations of TCP were done for large time sharing systems such as Tenex and TOPS 20. When desktop computers first appeared, it was thought by some that TCP was too big and complex to run on a personal computer. David Clark and his research group at MIT set out to show that a compact and simple implementation of TCP was possible. They produced an implementation, first for the Xerox Alto (the early personal workstation developed at Xerox PARC) and then for the IBM PC. This book was influential in spreading the lore of packet switching networks to a very wide community.

Widespread development of LANS, PCs and workstations in the 1980s allowed the nascent Internet to flourish. Ethernet technology, developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC in 1973, is now probably the dominant network technology in the Internet and PCs and workstations the dominant computers. This change from having a few networks with a modest number of time-shared hosts (the original ARPANET model) to having many networks has resulted in a number of new concepts and changes to the underlying technology. First, it resulted in the definition of three network classes (A, B, and C) to accommodate the range of networks. Class A represented large national scale networks (small number of networks with large numbers of hosts); Class B represented regional scale networks; and Class C represented local area networks (large number of networks with relatively few hosts).

A major shift occurred as a result of the increase in scale of the Internet and its associated management issues. Originally, there were a fairly limited number of hosts, so it was feasible to maintain a single table of all the hosts and their associated names and addresses. The shift to having a large number of independently managed networks (e.g., LANs) meant that having a single table of hosts was no longer feasible, and the Domain Name System (DNS) was invented by Paul Mockapetris of USC/ISI. The DNS permitted a scalable distributed mechanism for resolving hierarchical host names (e.g. www.webland.org) into an Internet address.

The increase in the size of the Internet also challenged the capabilities of the routers. Originally, there was a single distributed algorithm for routing that was implemented uniformly by all the routers in the Internet. As the number of networks in the Internet exploded, this initial design could not expand as necessary, so it was replaced by a hierarchical model of routing, with an Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) used inside each region of the Internet, and an Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) used to tie the regions together. New approaches for address aggregation, in particular classless inter-domain routing (CIDR), have recently been introduced to control the size of router tables.

As the Internet evolved, one of the major challenges was how to propagate the changes to the software, particularly the host software. DARPA supported UC Berkeley to investigate modifications to the UNIX operating system, including incorporating TCP/IP developed at BBN. Although Berkeley later rewrote the BBN code to more efficiently fit into the UNIX system and kernel, the incorporation of TCP/IP into the Unix BSD system releases proved to be a critical element in dispersion of the protocols to the research community. Looking back, the strategy of incorporating Internet protocols into a supported operating system for the research community was one of the key elements in the successful widespread adoption of the Internet.

One of the more interesting challenges was the transition of the ARPANET host protocol from NCP to TCP/IP as of January 1, 1983. TCP/IP was adopted as a defense standard three years earlier in 1980. This enabled defense to begin sharing in the DARPA Internet technology base and led directly to the eventual partitioning of the military and non- military communities. The transition of ARPANET from NCP to TCP/IP permitted it to be split into a MILNET supporting operational requirements and an ARPANET supporting research needs.

Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications. Electronic mail was being used broadly across several communities, often with different systems, but interconnection between different mail systems was demonstrating the utility of broad based electronic communications between people. (1985 was also the year Mark Slipp began working at the Toronto Stock Exchange . The TSE at the time was seriously looking at various methods of improving communication between member firms. Mark Slipp became involved in those discussions as the first secretary of the Pro Traders Association. The TSE subsequently became a world leader in electronic trading).

Creation of the Web Browser

The presentation of the first popular web browser, Mosaic, was integral in helping widen the use of the internet throughout the world.

Tim Berners-Lee created a method of interacting with the internet by using hypertext. This system allowed for easier sharing and accessing of data on the Internet. In response to this work in 1992, Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson, who worked at the NCSA ( National Center for Supercomputer Applications), a research institute at the University of Illinois, took great interest in the concept of the web. They, in turn, influenced the NCSA's Software Design Group by giving them a presentation of the web.

In February, 1993, two students from the group at the NCSA, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released a version for X-Windows on Unix computers. Bina supplied expert coding support, while Andreessen was responsible for giving exceptional customer support by staying on top of any arising problems that were brought to his attention by monitoring newsgroups and implementing improvements as needed.

A few months later Aleks Totic put out a version of Mosaic for Macintosh that he developed resulting in the first browser with cross-platform support.

Hardin and Thompson were able to create Mosaic as a free browser, available to everyone because they had access to the NCSA' s funding to aid scientific research by producing noncommercial software. Hardin and Thompson created mosaic out of a funded project which Hardin managed and Andreessen created software.

Mosaic evolved from the previous server developed by Berner-Lee to include graphic, sound and video clip support. Also, their implementation of forms support opened the door for novel uses and applications. Introducing bookmarks and history files improved the utility of the browser and helped lead to the web's widespread use and increased popularity.

After the commercial rights to Mosaic were handed to Spyglass Inc. in 1994, other companies were able to gain licenses for the technology, including Microsoft who used it for their Internet Explorer. Eventually, Microsoft and Netscape began developing their own browsers which led to the halt of Mosaic development in 1997.

In 1994, Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics Inc. and members of the Mosaic development team including Marc Andreessen came together to create a company, Mosaic Communications, which would develop the first commercial web browser. Their efforts were stalled when the University of Illinois filed a law suit against them and resulting from the settlement, Mosaic Communications became Netscape.

Netscape was able to develop a better browser with more technologically updated features then the NCSA, which led to the increased popularity and use of Netscape. Netscape released Mozilla 1.0, the first commercial web browser on December 15, 1994. Following this development, the Internet's web traffic greatly increased, surpassing the amount of Telnet traffic to become one of the largest sources of traffic on the NSFNET.

Netscape evolved quickly to include novel features leading to the incorporation of web, email, and newsgroups. The technology was designed to be accessible to the major operating systems Windows, Macintosh, and Unix. Another key point in the rapid increase in the popularity and usage of Netscape was the fact that it was available for free to individuals and non-profit organizations using the web. The browser usage remained free to users due to pressure from Microsoft's development of Internet Explorer. Instead of charging for the use of the Netscape browser, they turned to expect income from peripheral areas such as selling web server software.

Netscape had quickly risen to become one of the three largest ever Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1995. Eventually, Microsoft's advancement with Internet Explorer pressured Netscape to sell to America Online.

In 1998, Netscape source code became available for other developers to alter and improve on. It became open to millions of people with the potential of being able to offer improvements to their current service. In February 1998, MCC began the process of incorporating Webland .

Creation of Email

Electronic mail developed out of the communication abilities provided by the web technology and evolved in parallel with the Internet.

Simple message exchange arose from timesharing computers and with the creation of ARPANET came the production of email. Eventually, email became a very powerful technology and an integral part of the Internet today. In the 1960's timesharing computers were developed which allowed multiple programs to be run at the same time. This paved the way for the creation of programs allowing the exchange of text messages between individuals on the same network. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson created a simple email program which incorporated the ability to copy files over a network, forming the basis of today's email technology.

In 1972, commands were incorporated into the FTP program for the purpose of standardizing network transport. The FTP program was designed to send distinct copies of an email to each recipient. Further developments arose with the RD program created by Roberts which enabled the sorting of emails by subject and date, as well as functions to read, save and delete messages in a chosen order.

Improving on previous programs, John Vittal created MSG, which presented for the first time, commands such as message forwarding and reply. In 1975 the MSG program was extended for use on the Unix operating system, supporting multiple user interfaces. Later in 1977, Vittal collaborated with Dave Crocker, Kenneth Pogran and D. Austin Henderson to create a specification to link the different email formats being used throughout the ARPANET.

The first commercial email use was established in 1988 when Vinton Cerf initiated the connection of MCI mail to the NSFNET. Five years later, online email services were presented as network service providers began to connect their email systems to the internet. This development initiated the universal integration of email into Internet use. In 1999 Webland launched weblandmail as a free email service. More than 35,000 people signed up for accounts in the first month.

Creation of Instant Messenger

ICQ Inc. was created from the acquisition of Mirabilis Ltd. by America Online in 1998. Mirabilis was created in 1996 by Yair Goldfinger (26,Chief Technology Officer), Arik Vardi (27,Chief Executive Officer), Sefi Vigiser (25,President), and Amnon Amir (24, currently studying), in order to implement a new way of communicating by using the Internet. The popularity of the Internet had grown considerably and the founders of Mirabilis saw the potential in creating the technology to allow Internet users to connect with each other online and create peer-to-peer communication channels in an easy to use format. In 1996, the initial ICQ ("I Seek You") version was presented on the Internet. It gained instant recognition and popularity which grew exponentially after the first small group of users began introducing the technology to others. In six months the ICQ community developed into 850,000 registered users making Mirabilis the World's Largest On-line Communication Network.

The ICQ team experiences very rapid growth and has developed a strong and recognized brand name. It continuously develops additional products and services based on its technology such as User-Created Interest Lists and User-Created Public Chat-Rooms. In a very short time thousands of User-Created Chat-Rooms have been opened, some of them having hundreds of participants. At the time of this writing, tens of thousands of User-Created Interest Lists, Groups and active chat rooms, reflecting the wide diversity of human interest and creating a popular forum for the expression of the whole spectrum of individual tastes and agenda. Provided with a place for people with similar interest to locate on-line each other, tens of thousands of users already joined those lists.

Webland Instant Messenger (WIM) : Webland Inc. launched WIM (webland instant Messenger ) in the fall of 1999 as a UDP based messenger for our corporate clients. In January 2000 Webland launched WIM as a socket based solution with rave reviews.

The Transition to Widespread Infrastructure

At the same time that the Internet technology was being experimentally validated and widely used amongst a subset of computer science researchers, other networks and networking technologies were being pursued. The usefulness of computer networking - especially electronic mail - demonstrated by DARPA and Department of Defense contractors on the ARPANET was not lost on other communities and disciplines, so that by the mid-1970s computer networks had begun to spring up wherever funding could be found for the purpose. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) established MFENet for its researchers in Magnetic Fusion Energy, whereupon DoE's High Energy Physicists responded by building HEPNet. NASA Space Physicists followed with SPAN, and Rick Adrion, David Farber, and Larry Landweber established CSNET for the (academic and industrial) Computer Science community with an initial grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). AT&T's free-wheeling dissemination of the UNIX computer operating system spawned USENET, based on UNIX' built-in UUCP communication protocols, and in 1981 Ira Fuchs and Greydon Freeman devised BITNET, which linked academic mainframe computers in an "email as card images" paradigm.

In 1985, NSF made a critical decision - that TCP/IP would be mandatory for the NSFNET program. When Steve Wolff took over the NSFNET program in 1986, he recognized the need for a wide area networking infrastructure to support the general academic and research community, along with the need to develop a strategy for establishing such infrastructure on a basis ultimately independent of direct federal funding. NSF also elected to support DARPA's existing Internet organizational infrastructure, hierarchically arranged under the (then) Internet Activities Board (IAB). The public declaration of this choice was the joint authorship by the IAB's Internet Engineering and Architecture Task Forces and by NSF's Network Technical Advisory Group of RFC 985 (Requirements for Internet Gateways ), which formally ensured interoperability of DARPA's and NSF's pieces of the Internet.

In addition to the selection of TCP/IP for the NSFNET program, Federal agencies made and implemented several other policy decisions which shaped the Internet of today.

Federal agencies shared the cost of common infrastructure, such as trans-oceanic circuits. They also jointly supported "managed interconnection points" for interagency traffic; the Federal Internet Exchanges (FIX-E and FIX-W) built for this purpose served as models for the Network Access Points and "*IX" facilities that are prominent features of today's Internet architecture.

To coordinate this sharing, the Federal Networking Council was formed. The FNC also cooperated with other international organizations, such as RARE in Europe , through the Coordinating Committee on Intercontinental Research Networking, CCIRN, to coordinate Internet support of the research community worldwide.

This sharing and cooperation between agencies on Internet-related issues had a long history. An unprecedented 1981 agreement between Farber, acting for CSNET and the NSF, and DARPA's Kahn, permitted CSNET traffic to share ARPANET infrastructure on a statistical and no-metered-settlements basis.

Subsequently, in a similar mode, the NSF encouraged its regional (initially academic) networks of the NSFNET to seek commercial, non-academic customers, expand their facilities to serve them, and exploit the resulting economies of scale to lower subscription costs for all.

On the NSFNET Backbone - the national-scale segment of the NSFNET - NSF enforced an "Acceptable Use Policy" (AUP) which prohibited Backbone usage for purposes "not in support of Research and Education." The predictable (and intended) result of encouraging commercial network traffic at the local and regional level, while denying its access to national-scale transport, was to stimulate the emergence and/or growth of "private", competitive, long-haul networks such as PSI, UUNET, ANS CO+RE, and (later) others. In 1988, a National Research Council committee, chaired by Kleinrock and with Kahn and Clark as members, produced a report commissioned by NSF titled "Towards a National Research Network". This report was influential on then Senator Al Gore, and ushered in high speed networks that laid the networking foundation for the future information superhighway.

It anticipated the critical issues of intellectual property rights, ethics, pricing, education, architecture and regulation for the Internet.

NSF's privatization policy culminated in April, 1995, with the defunding of the NSFNET Backbone. The funds thereby recovered were (competitively) redistributed to regional networks to buy national-scale Internet connectivity from the now numerous, private, long-haul networks.

The backbone had made the transition from a network built from routers out of the research community (the "Fuzzball" routers from David Mills) to commercial equipment. It had seen the Internet grow to over 50,000 networks on all seven continents and outer space, with approximately 29,000 networks in the United States .

Internet Documentation

A key to the rapid growth of the Internet has been the free and open access to the basic documents, especially the specifications of the protocols.

The beginnings of the ARPANET and the Internet in the university research community promoted the academic tradition of open publication of ideas and results. However, the normal cycle of traditional academic publication was too formal and too slow for the dynamic exchange of ideas essential to creating networks.

At first the RFCs were printed on paper and distributed via snail mail. As the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) came into use, the RFCs were prepared as online files and accessed via FTP. Now, of course, the RFCs are easily accessed via the World Wide Web at dozens of sites around the world. SRI, in its role as Network Information Center , maintained the online directories.

The effect of the RFCs was to create a positive feedback loop, with ideas or proposals presented in one RFC triggering another RFC with additional ideas, and so on. When some consensus (or a least a consistent set of ideas) had come together a specification document would be prepared. Over time, the RFCs have become more focused on protocol standards (the "official" specifications), though there are still informational RFCs that describe alternate approaches, or provide background information on protocols and engineering issues. The RFCs are now viewed as the "documents of record" in the Internet engineering and standards community.

Email has been a significant factor in all areas of the Internet ( weblandmail was an early pioneer ), and that is certainly true in the development of protocol specifications, technical standards, and Internet engineering. The very early RFCs often presented a set of ideas developed by the researchers at one location to the rest of the community. After email came into use, the authorship pattern changed - RFCs were presented by joint authors with common view independent of their locations.

The IETF now has in excess of 75 working groups, each working on a different aspect of Internet engineering. Each of these working groups has a mailing list to discuss one or more draft documents under development. As the current rapid expansion of the Internet is fueled by the realization of its capability to promote information sharing, we should understand that the network's first role in information sharing was sharing the information about its own design and operation through the RFC documents.

The Internet Community

The Internet is as much a collection of communities as a collection of technologies, and its success is largely attributable to both satisfying basic community needs as well as utilizing the community in an effective way to push the infrastructure forward. The early ARPANET researchers worked as a close-knit community to accomplish the initial demonstrations of packet switching technology described earlier. Likewise, the Packet Satellite, Packet Radio and several other DARPA computer science research programs were multi-contractor collaborative activities that heavily used whatever available mechanisms there were to coordinate their efforts, starting with electronic mail and adding file sharing, remote access, and eventually World Wide Web capabilities. Each of these programs formed a working group, starting with the ARPANET Network Working Group. Because of the unique role that ARPANET played as an infrastructure supporting the various research programs, as the Internet started to evolve, the Network Working Group evolved into Internet Working Group.

In the late 1970's, recognizing that the growth of the Internet was accompanied by a growth in the size of the interested research community and therefore an increased need for coordination mechanisms, the manager of the Internet Program at DARPA, formed several coordination bodies - an International Cooperation Board (ICB), chaired by Peter Kirstein of UCL, to coordinate activities with some cooperating European countries centered on Packet Satellite research, an Internet Research Group which was an inclusive group providing an environment for general exchange of information, and an Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB), chaired by Clark. The ICCB was an invitational body to assist in managing the burgeoning Internet activity.

The Internet Activities Board (IAB) was formed from the chairs of the Task Forces.

No longer was DARPA the only major player in the funding of the Internet. The growth continued, resulting in even further substructure within both the IAB and IETF. The IETF combined Working Groups into Areas, and designated Area Directors. An Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG ) was formed of the Area Directors. The IAB recognized the increasing importance of the IETF, and restructured the standards process to explicitly recognize the IESG as the major review body for standards. The IAB also restructured so that the rest of the Task Forces (other than the IETF) were combined into an Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with the old task forces renamed as research groups.

The growth in the commercial sector brought with it increased concern regarding the standards process itself. Starting in the early 1980's and continuing to this day, the Internet grew beyond it's primarily research roots to include both a broad user community and increased commercial activity. There remains today a great misconception amongst the youth who are today's drivers of the internet. In 1992, the Internet Activities Board was re-organized and re-named the Internet Architecture Board operating under the auspices of the Internet Society. Ultimately, a cooperative and mutually supportive relationship was formed between the IAB, IETF, and Internet Society, with the Internet Society taking on as a goal the provision of service and other measures which would facilitate the work of the IETF.

The recent development and widespread deployment of the World Wide Web has brought with it a new community, as many of the people working on the WWW have not thought of themselves as primarily network researchers and developers. A new coordination organization was formed, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Initially led from MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science by Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the WWW) and Al Vezza, W3C has taken on the responsibility for evolving the various protocols and standards associated with the Web .

Thus, through the over two decades of Internet activity, we have seen a steady evolution of organizational structures designed to support and facilitate an ever-increasing community working collaboratively on Internet issues.

Commercialization of the Technology

Commercialization of the Internet involved not only the development of competitive, private network services, but also the development of commercial products implementing the Internet technology. In the early 1980s, dozens of vendors were incorporating TCP/IP into their products because they saw buyers for that approach to networking. Unfortunately they lacked both real information about how the technology was supposed to work and how the customers planned on using this approach to networking. The DOD had mandated the use of TCP/IP in many of its purchases but gave little help to the vendors regarding how to build useful TCP/IP products.

The speakers came mostly from the DARPA research community who had both developed these protocols and used them in day to day work. About 250 vendor personnel came to listen to 50 inventors and experimenters. After two years of conferences, tutorials, design meetings and workshops, a special event was organized that invited those vendors whose products ran TCP/IP well enough to come together in one room for three days to show off how well they all worked together and also ran over the Internet. In September of 1988 the first Interop trade show was born. 5,000 engineers from potential customer organizations came to see if it all did work as was promised. Because the vendors worked extremely hard to ensure that everyone's products interoperated with all of the other products - even with those of their competitors. The Interop trade show has grown immensely since then and today it is held in 7 locations around the world each year to an audience of over 250,000 people who come to learn which products work with each other in a seamless manner, learn about the latest products, and discuss the latest technology.

In parallel with the commercialization efforts that were highlighted by the Interop activities, the vendors began to attend the IETF meetings that were held 3 or 4 times a year to discuss new ideas for extensions of the TCP/IP protocol suite. Starting with a few hundred attendees mostly from academia and paid for by the government, these meetings now often exceed a thousand attendees, mostly from the vendor community and paid for by the attendees themselves. This self-selected group evolves the TCP/IP suite in a mutually cooperative manner. Network management provides an example of the interplay between the research and commercial communities. In the beginning of the Internet, the emphasis was on defining and implementing protocols that achieved interoperation. As the network grew larger, it became clear that the sometime ad hoc procedures used to manage the network would not scale. Manual configuration of tables was replaced by distributed automated algorithms, and better tools were devised to isolate faults. Several protocols for this purpose were proposed, including Simple Network Management Protocol or SNMP (designed, as its name would suggest, for simplicity, and derived from an earlier proposal called SGMP), HEMS (a more complex design from the research community) and CMIP (from the OSI community). SNMP is now used almost universally for network based management.

Originally, commercial efforts mainly comprised vendors providing the basic networking products, and service providers offering the connectivity and basic Internet services. This has been tremendously accelerated by the widespread and rapid adoption of browsers and the World Wide Web technology, allowing users easy access to information linked throughout the globe. Products are available to facilitate the provisioning of that information and many of the latest developments in technology have been aimed at providing increasingly sophisticated information services on top of the basic Internet data communications. Allowing Webland clients such as Bobby Orr - www.bobbyorr.com , Giving Gallery - www.givinggallery.com , Extreme Fitness - www.extremefitness.info , THIO - www.thio.tv , Marshall Capital Corporation - www.marshallcapital.com and www.wellingtonhealthcare.com doing more and more volumes of online business.

The Internet Today

The Internet has changed much in the two decades since it came into existence. It was conceived in the era of time-sharing, but has survived into the era of personal computers, client-server and peer-to-peer computing, and the network computer. It was designed before LANs existed, but has accommodated that new network technology, as well as the more recent ATM and frame switched services. It was envisioned as supporting a range of functions from file sharing and remote login to resource sharing and collaboration, and has spawned electronic mail and more recently the World Wide Web. But most important, it started as the creation of a small band of dedicated researchers, and has grown to be a commercial success with billions of dollars of annual investment.

Many Webland customers create online business to augment and grow their existing business. Recent research indicates online commerce will grow at an even faster pace. The worldwide internet population will hit 1.07bn in 2005, according to Computer Industry Almanac, up from 934m in 2004. A boon to business that operates online, this kind of growth creates more opportunities for business that operate online. We expect e-commerce in America to grow 14% annually through 2010; three to four times faster than the economy. Growth in Europe is predicted to average 33% annually through to 2009.

Improving business-to-business (B2B) infrastructure will power Europe's online trade to €2.2trn ($2.75trn) in 2006, with France , Germany and Britain accounting for almost two-thirds of activity. More stunning: by 2008 China will account for half of all B2B e-commerce in the Asia-Pacific region with total revenues of $1.29trn and a cumulative growth of 81%. India 's growth through to 2008 is even higher, at 83%.

America's growing population of online shopping households, combined with site improvements by retailers, will see business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce account for 12% of total retail sales; or $316bn - in 2010 (up from 7% in 2004). Sales of home products, clothing and computer hardware and software will lead the way.

With an evolving search site A9.com (combining the best of Google and Kartoo); Amazon is joining the group of internet superpowers - MSN, eBay, Google and Yahoo! Each strive not just to be portals, search sites or shopping malls, but also places to get anything done online.

The future is online!

One should not conclude that the Internet has now finished changing. The Internet, although a network in name and geography, is a creature of the computer, not the traditional network of the telephone or television industry. It will, indeed it must, continue to change and evolve at the speed of the computer industry if it is to remain relevant. It is now changing to provide such new services as real time transport, in order to support, for example, audio and video streams. The availability of pervasive networking (i.e., the Internet) along with powerful affordable computing and communications in portable form (i.e., laptop computers, two-way pagers, PDAs, cellular phones), is making possible a new paradigm of nomadic computing and communications.

This evolution will bring us new applications - Internet telephone and, slightly further out, Internet television. It is evolving to permit more sophisticated forms of pricing and cost recovery, a perhaps painful requirement in this commercial world. It is changing to accommodate yet another generation of underlying network technologies with different characteristics and requirements, from broadband residential access to satellites. New modes of access and new forms of service will spawn new applications, which in turn will drive further evolution of the net itself.

The most pressing question for the future of the Internet is not how the technology will change, but how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed. As this paper describes, the architecture of the Internet has always been driven by a core group of designers, but the form of that group has changed as the number of interested parties has grown. With the success of the Internet has come a proliferation of stakeholders - stakeholders now with an economic as well as an intellectual investment in the network. We now see, in the debates over control of the domain name space and the form of the next generation IP addresses, a struggle to find the next social structure that will guide the Internet in the future. The form of that structure will be harder to find, given the large number of concerned stake-holders. At the same time, the industry struggles to find the economic rationale for the large investment needed for the future growth, for example to upgrade residential access to a more suitable technology. If the Internet stumbles, it will not be because we lack for technology, vision, or motivation. It will be because we cannot set a direction and march collectively into the future. As we experienced with every other evolution in commerce we need regulation for validation. Until the government (the people) step up to the plate and provide a sense of security and confidence to the masses the internet will stumble. South Korea has provided an example of leadership and has found itself at the front of the line of internet development.

As the FCC steps up to the plate and provides a licensed internet environment through effective regulation commerce and usage in areas such as education will explode. (See history of railways and radios)

Webland is a Canadian organization, established in 1998; a company of systems designers, developers, telecommunications experts and analysts. We distinguish ourselves from other companies by fulfilling all systems needs: analysis and design; hardware and software supply and installation; and technical support at every stage of implementation and use. Our team provides access to emerging technologies and procedures and ensures personalized service to every client.

Webland provides a wide range of technology consulting and design services. We provide users with the professional services required to plan and implement Technology solutions. Webland provides these services for a wide range of technologies including desktops and servers, applications, database, data communications networks and systems management. Call Webland at 1.888.317.6592 for development of your eCommerce projects.

The History of the Integrated Circuit

Our world is full of integrated circuits. You find several of them in computers. For example, most people have probably heard about the microprocessor. The microprocessor is an integrated circuit that processes all information in the computer. It keeps track of what keys are pressed and if the mouse has been moved. It counts numbers and runs programs, games and the operating system. Integrated circuits are also found in almost every modern electrical device such as cars, television sets, CD players, cellular phones, etc. But what is an integrated circuit and what is the history behind it?

The integrated circuit is nothing more than a very advanced electric circuit. An electric circuit is made from different electrical components such as transistors, resistors, capacitors and diodes, that are connected to each other in different ways. These components have different behaviors.

The transistor acts like a switch. It can turn electricity on or off, or it can amplify current. It is used for example in computers to store information, or in stereo amplifiers to make the sound signal stronger.

The resistor limits the flow of electricity and gives us the possibility to control the amount of current that is allowed to pass. Resistors are used, among other things, to control the volume in television sets or radios.

The capacitor collects electricity and releases it all in one quick burst; like for instance in cameras where a tiny battery can provide enough energy to fire the flashbulb.

The diode stops electricity under some conditions and allows it to pass only when these conditions change. This is used in, for example, photocells where a light beam that is broken triggers the diode to stop electricity from flowing through it.

These components are like the building blocks in an electrical construction kit. Depending on how the components are put together when building the circuit, everything from a burglar alarm to a computer microprocessor can be constructed.

Jack Kilby's Chip - the Monolithic Idea

In the summer of 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments found a solution to this problem. He was newly employed and had been set to work on a project to build smaller electrical circuits. However, the path that Texas Instruments had chosen for its miniaturization project didn't seem to be the right one to Kilby.

Because he was newly employed, Kilby had no vacation like the rest of the staff. Working alone in the lab, he saw an opportunity to find a solution of his own to the miniaturization problem. Kilby's idea was to make all the components and the chip out of the same block (monolith) of semiconductor material. When the rest of the workers returned from vacation, Kilby presented his new idea to his superiors. He was allowed to build a test version of his circuit. In September 1958, he had his first integrated circuit ready. It was tested and it worked perfectly!

Although the first integrated circuit was pretty crude and had some problems, the idea was groundbreaking. By making all the parts out of the same block of material and adding the metal needed to connect them as a layer on top of it, there was no more need for individual discrete components. No more wires and components had to be assembled manually. The circuits could be made smaller and the manufacturing process could be automated.

Jack Kilby is probably most famous for his invention of the integrated circuit, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in the year 2000. After his success with the integrated circuit Kilby stayed with Texas Instruments and, among other things, he led the team that invented the hand-held calculator.

Robert Noyce

Robert Noyce came up with his own idea for the integrated circuit. He did it half a year later than Jack Kilby. Noyce's circuit solved several practical problems that Kilby's circuit had, mainly the problem of interconnecting all the components on the chip. This was done by adding the metal as a final layer and then removing some of it so that the wires needed to connect the components were formed. This made the integrated circuit more suitable for mass production. Besides being one of the early pioneers of the integrated circuit, Robert Noyce also was one of the co-founders of Intel. Intel is one of the largest manufacturers of integrated circuits in the world.

 The integrated circuit has come a long way since Jack Kilby's first prototype. His idea founded a new industry and is the key element behind our computerized society. Today the most advanced circuits contain several hundred millions of components on an area no larger than a fingernail. The transistors on these chips are around 90 nm, that is 0.00009 millimeters * , which means that you could fit hundreds of these transistors inside a red blood cell.

Each year computer chips become more powerful yet cheaper than the year before. Gordon Moore, one of the early integrated circuit pioneers and founders of Intel once said, "If the auto industry advanced as rapidly as the semiconductor industry, a Rolls Royce would get a half a million miles per gallon, and it would be cheaper to throw it away than to park it.

COMPUTER HISTORY

In 1946, the public got its first glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.

1948 IBM´s Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator computed scientific data in public display near the company´s Manhattan headquarters. Before its decommissioning in 1952, the SSEC produced the moon-position tables used for plotting the course of the 1969 Apollo flight to the moon.

1949, Maurice Wilkes assembled the EDSAC, the first practical stored-program computer, at Cambridge University . His ideas grew out of the Moore School lectures he had attended three years earlier.

For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes established a library of short programs called subroutines stored on punched paper tapes.

1951, MIT´s Whirlwind debuted on Edward R. Murrow´s "See It Now" television series. Project director Jay Forrester described the computer as a "reliable operating system," running 35 hours a week at 90-percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

Move to 1975

1975, The January edition of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800 computer kit, based on Intel´s 8080 microprocessor, on its cover. Within weeks of the computer´s debut, customers inundated the manufacturing company, MITS, with orders. Bill Gates and Paul Allen licensed BASIC as the software language for the Altair. Ed Roberts invented the 8800 - which sold for $297, or $395 with a case - and coined the term "personal computer." The machine came with 256 bytes of memory (expandable to 64K) and an open 100-line bus structure that evolved into the S-100 standard. In 1977, MITS sold out to Pertec, which continued producing Altairs through 1978. The visual display module (VDM) prototype, designed in 1975 by Lee Felsenstein, marked the first implementation of a memory-mapped alphanumeric video display for personal computers. Introduced at the Altair Convention in Albuquerque in March 1976, the visual display module allowed use of personal computers for interactive games.

1976, Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I, a single-board computer. With specifications in hand and an order for 100 machines at $500 each from the Byte Shop, he and Steve Jobs got their start in business. In this photograph of the Apple I board, the upper two rows are a video terminal and the lower two rows are the computer. The 6502 microprocessor in the white package sits on the lower right. About 200 of the machines sold before the company announced the Apple II as a complete computer.

1976, The Cray I made its name as the first commercially successful vector processor. The fastest machine of its day, its speed came partly from its shape, a C, which reduced the length of wires and thus the time signals needed to travel across them.

1977, The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) - the first of several personal computers released in 1977 - came fully assembled and was straightforward to operate, with either 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, two built-in cassette drives, and a membrane "chiclet" keyboard.

The Apple II became an instant success when released in 1977 with it´s printed circuit motherboard, switching power supply, keyboard, case assembly, manual, game paddles, A/C powercord, and cassette tape with the computer game "Breakout." When hooked up to a color television set, the Apple II produced brilliant color graphics.

In the first month after its release, Tandy Radio Shack´s first desktop computer - the TRS-80 - sold 10,000 units, well more than the company´s projected sales of 3,000 units for one year. Priced at $599.95, the machine included a Z80 based microprocessor, a video display, 4 kilobytes of memory, BASIC, cassette storage, and easy-to-understand manuals that assumed no prior knowledge on the part of the consumer.

1981, IBM introduced its PC, igniting a fast growth of the personal computer market. The first PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft´s MS-DOS operating system.

Adam Osborne completed the first portable computer, the Osborne I, which weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795. The price made the machine especially attractive, as it included software worth about $1,500. The machine featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives.

Apollo Computer unveiled the first work station, its DN100, offering more power than some minicomputers at a fraction of the price. Apollo Computer and Sun Microsystems, another early entrant in the work station market, optimized their machines to run the computer-intensive graph

1983, Apple introduced its Lisa. The first personal computer with a graphical user interface, its development was central in the move to such systems for personal computers. The Lisa´s sloth and high price ($10,000) led to its ultimate failure.

The Lisa ran on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor and came equipped with 1 megabyte of RAM, a 12-inch black-and-white monitor, dual 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives and a 5 megabyte Profile hard drive. The Xerox Star - which included a system called Smalltalk that involved a mouse, windows, and pop-up menus - inspired the Lisa´s designers.ics programs common in engineering.

Compaq Computer Corp. introduced first PC clone that used the same software as the IBM PC. With the success of the clone, Compaq recorded first-year sales of $111 million, the most ever by an American business in a single year.

With the introduction of its PC clone, Compaq launched a market for IBM-compatible computers that by 1996 had achieved a 83-percent share of the personal computer market. Designers reverse-engineered the Compaq clone, giving it nearly 100-percent compatibility with the IBM.

1987, IBM introduced its PS/2 machines, which made the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drive and video graphics array standard for IBM computers. The first IBMs to include Intel´s 80386 chip, the company had shipped more than 1 million units by the end of the year. IBM released a new operating system, OS/2, at the same time, allowing the use of a mouse with IBMs for the first time.

1998, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who left Apple to form his own company, unveiled the NeXT. The computer he created failed but was recognized as an important innovation. At a base price of $6,500, the NeXT ran too slowly to be popular.

The significance of the NeXT rested in its place as the first personal computer to incorporate a drive for an optical storage disk, a built-in digital signal processor that allowed voice recognition, and object-oriented languages to simplify programming. The NeXT offered Motorola 68030 microprocessors, 8 megabytes of RAM, and a 256-megabyte read/write optical disk storage.

FREE INTERNET ACCESS: Webland - Spinway.com 
Established in 1998, Spin Media Network Inc.(provided businesses with co-branded or private label, free dial-up Internet access for use in driving traffic and broadening brand identity. Spinway.com's technology  intended to solv e the targetability, tracking and rich media shortcomings of traditional browser-based advertising. First to market with full-motion video at dial-up, Spinway.com deliver ed targeted, trackable, 30 frames per second, non-streaming television quality commercials over standard dial-up modems - without impacting  the user's experience. Spinway.com incorporate d partners' technology to include personalized content, rewards programs, instant messaging, full-featured email and parental control software. The  intended result was an effective marketing tool that propel ed user acquisition and retention, dr ove more traffic to partner sites and provide them with a constant connection to their user base.

At what was arguably the zenith of the dot com boom the founders of webland were introduced to spinway in 1998. Because of webland's interest in acquiring users an anguished decision was made to establish a partnership with spinway and offer free internet access to webland customers and webland's customers customers. This was at first an exciting idea for webland but ultimately contributed greatly to webland's decision to change it's business model. In each session with potential webland partners the amount of focus on free internet access often distracted our partners from our original focus of improving and establishing better CRM and customer dialogue. The ultimate result of this partnership was to scale back webland's original initiatives and focus on providing leading edge e-commerce solutions to the SMB market. Webland's success with www.bobbyorr.com , www.givinggallery.com , www.weblandarcade.com , webland's newsletter system and our feedback customer survey system have consolidated our position as a leading e-commerce service company.

Webland Google Update Opportunity

Webland SEO level one approach.

At this point in the game, we are all well aware that obtaining good Google rankings early in your search engine optimization campaign is a highly important variable to launching your campaign. With regards to non-monetary search engine submissions, Google is one of the few left, but also one of the fastest for inclusion times. As with most things, with this come risks and potential problems that webmasters and SEOs need to bear in mind while in production and pre-launch phases of the campaign. While we do know that Google spiders before and after certain phases, we are not certain at what point in the month they will do their spidering and update their database. Below webland highlights what the Google cycle entails, when and how to catch Googlebot at the right time, and what this means for your search engine optimization campaign. Webland will insist that your content is accurate to insure your project achieves the best results possible.

The Google Cycle

While the Google update cycle is well documented, webland has noticed this cycle has become less of a pattern and more of a shot in the dark for those who await the update. The cycle begins with Google doing a major crawl (crawl 1), or spidering, which is when it sends Googlebot out to spider the current sites within its database (DB) as well as to find new websites that have been put online. Once Google has completed this crawl, grabbing all of the webpages for its next update, Google will then update its database, showing the new results on www2.google.com and www3.google.com. During the update, the results are often shuffled between the primary database and the second and third database, and since Google uses over 10,000 servers, people in all areas of the world are usually seeing different results until the dust completely settles from the update. The update will continue for a few days, but usually no longer than a week in duration.

During and directly following the database update, Google will again begin heavy crawling (crawl 2), or spidering, of the existing websites in its database and new websites that have been launched. After this crawl by Googlebot, the cycle returns to the beginning and starts all over again for the next month.

Catching Google and Googlebot at the Right Time
To have your website included in the Google database, or have your site's updates reflected in the database, as soon as possible, you need to do some planning and preparing so that you can catch Googlebot at the correct position in the cycle. We know that there is the initial Googlebot crawl in the beginning of the month, as well as a crawl during and directly after the update.

So, if you wish to have a new website included in the DB, will either of these crawls insure your inclusion into the database? It has been seen that this is not always the case. Mainly, if your website is crawled in the beginning of the month, the chances are that your website will not be included in that months update. If your website is crawled during the second crawl of the month, which is directly following the update, it is possible that your website will be revisited in the next crawl and then included in the next update. Other times Google will visit a new site and grab only the robots.txt and the homepage. This is a good indication that Googlebot will be back during the next major crawl and your website will be included in the update following that second crawl. So, looking back, it seems that for your new site to be included in the Google database it will take two visits from Googlebot. This is true for most cases.

To get the fastest inclusion time possible, there are a few things that you can do. If your website is crawled for the first time by Googlebot during or directly after the update, then you are in good shape as it is more than likely your website will be included in the next month's update. If your website is not crawled at this point, but during the next crawl, you will have to wait even longer for your website to be included in Google's database. So, how do you get Googlebot to crawl your website during that specific time period? You can either hope that it will happen this way, or you can do your homework and plan it out. If you have other websites that are in the Google database, you can watch the crawling and update dates and then plan your launch accordingly. If you don't have any websites in the Google database that you can monitor, you can either watch Google.com for the updates, or you can read about crawling and update times at WebMasterWorld.com's Google forum , or contact your webland representative.

While there is almost no way to be 100% sure that your website is going to be crawled, there are certain things that you or webland can do to get Googlebot's attention and attract the robot to your site. The first thing to do is obtain links to your site from other websites with a high PageRank. The higher the PageRank of a website, the more that website will be crawled and refreshed by Google, which means your link will be picked up more quickly. Secondly, you can submit your website to Google through their Add URL page . This is not a definite way into the database, and is not 100% reliable. The third thing that you can do is install the Google Toolbar , and then visit your own website through the toolbar. There have been numerous reports of a direct correlation between a website's inclusion into the database and a visit through the Google Toolbar. While it will cost you $299 annually, a Yahoo! directory listing is also a help in getting into Google's database, and Yahoo! offers quick inclusion times (7 days) into their directory. An Open Directory Project listing is also a very good way to have your website included in the database, although this can sometimes take long periods of time, and is not 100% reliable. Being patient and planning your content to match the words being searched by your audience will insure you achieve the best rank available. Contact Webland to define your SEO planning process.

How This Affects Your Webland SEO Campaign
The information that is available to SEO professionals and webmasters regarding Google's crawling and update patterns can unquestionably help in planning and executing our search engine optimization campaigns. Not only can it help drastically with the above, it can also help in our schedules as updates and new developments need to be launched online by a certain date and time to be included in the database. As Google commands a high percentage of search engine referrals and traffic, having a rough idea of when this will kick in can be a large help.

Planning seasonal or product introduction campaigns requires an ongoing monitoring of the Google crawl. Webland will help you plan your updates and campaign so that your efforts meet with success. Contact www.webland.ca today for more information on how you can manage a profitable SEO campaign!