On March 14, ITworldcanada.com was officially relaunched, and it would be an understatement to say that the Web site’s staff is excited about its new look and feel, its countless new features and its unique place in the Canadian IT information market.
We’re also excited to be playing a large role in what will, in all likelihood, be referred to by future generations as the Internet’s “Golden Age.”
Every technological innovation that has a profound effect on society invariably enjoys a Golden Age: a time when the technology is still a novelty, when everything associated with it seems exciting, when its possibilities seem endless. For TV, it was the 1950s and for the automobile it was the 1920s.
A similar feeling is currently surrounding the Internet. Though much of its potential has yet to be realized, the ‘net has already become a prime means of exchanging information. ITworldcanada.com is helping to make the Internet such a valuable communication tool, and we’re doing it in a number of ways.
Every day, through our Daily ITwire section, we provide a thorough offering of the day’s top IT news stories, and we update the section throughout the day with late-breaking items – a
must for any online publication that wants to keep pace with this light-speed industry.
Our Ask an IT Expert area provides a forum for all members of the industry to ask those in the know specific questions about various technologies. ITworldcanada.com lines up the most knowledgeable technological implementers and educators to answer readers’ questions and comments.
The site also features video interviews with the industry’s leading executives, analysts and educators. Visitors can come to our Industry Interviews section to see and hear the most timely and important issues discussed and debated.
And, perhaps most importantly, ITworldcanada.com offers its visitors eight vast warehouses of IT information, each dedicated to a specific area of the industry, from Skills Management to E-Commerce. Each one contains a number of in-depth feature and news articles, white papers, event listings and numerous other resources for those in need of the most relevant information available.
Two of the most important areas that ITworldcanada.com covers are the networking and telecommunications markets. As developments in these sectors begin to take an increasingly large role in the way business is conducted, our Web site will be tracking their progress. We’ll be doing so in a number of ways, such as reporting developments in our Daily ITwire section as soon as they happen; by presenting interviews with networking and telecom analysts and executives, both in text and video format; and by providing readers, through our Ask an IT Expert section, the chance to ask in-depth technical questions about a variety of networking and telecom topics.
The most noticeable indication of how important networking and telecom is to ITworldcanada.com, however, can be found in our What Keeps You Up At Night knowledge centre area. While the influence of these sectors will be reflected in all of the centres, the “Converging Voice and Data” and “Migrating to New Networking Technologies” will be of particular interest to Network World Canada readers.
For the former, it appears that the convergence so talked about by vendors has yet to truly take hold. It is clear, however, that reality will eventually catch up with the hype, and this resource will track every development along that potentially rocky road. Stories drawn from an extensive resource of worldwide IDG publications, as well as from the publication you’re holding right now, will assist networking and telecom professionals in cutting through the hype and finding out exactly what the state of convergence is at any given time.
One of the biggest strengths of ITworldcanada.com is its ability to provide Canadian-specific information to its readership, and nowhere is this more evident than in our coverage of the telecommunications industry. Although merger-mania and other factors are making this sector an increasingly global one, as opposed to a regional one, many of the issues facing Canadian telecom professionals are unique to this country, and ITworldcanada.com is, and will continue to be, the best resource on the Internet to come to for that information.
These and numerous other features make ITworldcandada.com the only Canadian Web site offering such a comprehensive collection of IT information, and we plan to keep it that way.
We’re excited to be part of the Internet’s Golden Age, and we invite you to join in our excitement by checking us out at
www.ITworldcanada.com.
Enright (greg_enright@lti.on.ca) is editor of ITworldcanada.com
