NETWORK

Branching out
The Tree of Life (TOL) is being rated as the most worthwhile thing on the web by biologists. Planted by the Maddison brothers of the University of Arizona, US, on the World Wide Web, the TOL is growing fast and far to reach institutions around the globe. The tree is a vast on-line endeavour that currently holds over 1,000 pages, providing molecular and morphological (dealing with the form of living beings) data on organisms. The goal is to ultimately bring all the information ranging from the genetic and evolutionary relationships to photographs and life histories of every type of living organism within the reach of users

Browsing brawl
A battle of the browsers is on between the US-based Microsoft Corp and Netscape Communications Corp. Recently, Microsoft launched its latest Internet browser software, Internet Explorer version 3.0 while its arch rival Netscape released the third version of its Navigator browser. Browser is the software that people use to cruise the World Wide Web, the graphics-rich portion of the Internet. So far, more than 85 per cent of those surfing the Net have been using the Netscape browser

Sounds better
The British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Ceefax teletext service has been redesigned to overcome its worst feature -- the painfully slow search procedure. The new scheme repackages the Ceefax information in the hypertext mark-up language used to format Web pages and broadcasts it alongside a radio channel on the BBC's Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) service. Anyone equipped with an Internet browsing software can search the Ceefax like a Web site by connecting a DAB radio to their personal computer. This allows a constant stream of the latest news and information to a desktop computer and saves the never-ending phone calls to the Internet.