About this Issue

Welcome to the October issue of Interface on the Internet, the E-journal of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies at Pacific University.

Our Gaming Editor, Chris Pruett, returns after a hiatus during which he has moved to Google as a software engineer. His current piece is "Game Design for Managers" and is located at http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2007/05/pruett.php. This concerns one of the staples of gaming, "Resource Management." Anyone who has run out of stone or labor before completing his or her capital city will find this article useful as will as will those wishing to better understand the complexities of game design.

Security Editor Pat McGregor offers more food for anxiety for paranoids, or for those with a good understanding of the impact of the Internet, in "Is Your Photocopier Ratting You Out?" found at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2007/05/mcgregor.php. This article may reassure many of us. On the other hand, it may not.

A long-term issue for businesses — long term since the medieval era in the West — has been the sanctity of the trademark. The World Wide Web has complicated this issue, as it has complicated many others. Legal Editor Leonard DuBoff offers "Protecting Your Business's Most Valuable Asset" at http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2007/05/duboff.php.

We are pleased to introduce a new editor to Interface, Dr. Tom Cockburn, of the Waikoto Institute of Technology, New Zealand. Tom is a highly published and internationally recognized expert in electronic training and learning within business environments. His debut piece is "Anecdotes and Antidotes: Organizational Learning Through the Ages," found at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2007/05/cockburn.php. Welcome, Tom!

Our book reviews are focused around criticisms of the Internet. The first is Peter D. Hershock's Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age. This is, to say the least, a thorough criticism not only of the Internet, but also of the Western cultural assumptions that produced it. The second is Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. It is an example of the Chicken Little school of internet criticism: "The sky is falling, culturally speaking, and the Internet is the cause!" These reviews are subsumed in an editorial essay found at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2007/05/hershock.php.

The editorial essay, "Criticisms of the Internet: From Inside and Outside. An Editorial Review Essay," is found at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2007/05/hershock.php. There it is argued that the nature of the criticisms of the Internet have fundamentally changed, and now come necessarily from, in a sense, inside the Internet itself.

We hope as always that you find this issue of Interface useful, entertaining, and provocative.

Jeffrey Barlow

Editor, Interface.