From: eye5@interlog.com (eye WEEKLY)
Newsgroups: eye.news,alt.revisionism
Subject: EYENET: And the site of the year is ...
Followup-To: eye.general,alt.revisionism
Date: 28 Mar 1996 19:36:07 -0500
Organization: eye -- Toronto's Arts Newspaper
Approved: eye@interlog.com
Message-ID: <4jfb9n$g8f@gold.interlog.com>
Reply-To: eye@interlog.com

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eye WEEKLY                                              March 28, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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EYENET                                                          EYENET

                        WELCOME TO THE WEBBIES

                                  by
                            K.K . CAMPBELL 

As you've no doubt been told, eye remains on the bleeding edge of The 
New Media Revolution -- whatever that is.

As part of these god-we're-kool responsibilities, eye.NET maintains 
Canada's daily web awards: the eyeSITE AWARDS, or "Webbies" for short, 
acknowledging primo web sites around the country.

Oh, how they laughed at us when we uncrated the bronze Webby and 
slammed it down on the table ("Heavy enough to kill a man with" was 
our primary design criteria). "A quality Canadian web site every 
day?!" they cackled. "Can't be done! There ain't enough!"

Oh, how wrong those jeering jackals were. In '95, thousands of 
Canadians hit the World Wide Web with content and chrome. (For a 
discussion of "content vs chrome," see eyeSITE philosophy at 
http://www.interlog.com/eye/eyeSITE/eyesite.htm) Our nation is the 
most wired country in the world -- what else is there to do on a 
freezing Tuesday night? Watch TV?

We see every day the groundswell seeking to blow out the Old Guard 
publishing model of well-defined "producers" and "consumers" who 
merely cycle money-fuelled culture at each other.

In recognition of this net.phenomenology, each night eye.NET bestows a 
"Webby" on the day's top Great White North web site. Come the close of 
the publishing week, these daily winners are lined up by the crack 
team of eye.NET experts and analyzed by our Content-Chrome-Creativity 
(C3) Algorithm, yielding the eyeSITE for the WEEK. Come the end of the 
month, those four or five sites are again studied, resulting in the 
eyeSITE for the MONTH. Then those are culled for the eyeSITE for the 
YEAR.

                   AND THE SITE OF THE YEAR IS ...

And the winner of the 1995 eyeSITE for the YEAR is... (drum roll)... 
Vancouver's Ken McVay and his home-grown, internationally famous 
Nizkor Project at http://www.almanac.bc.ca .

Nizkor was started by McVay in 1995 to combat the rise of Holocaust 
denial and neo-Nazi net propaganda. The web site archives megs and 
megs of documentation on the Nazi slaughter of 12 million Europeans -- 
including 6 million Jews.

Nizkor is the world's largest publicly accessible repository of 
electronic texts and digitized materials pertaining to fascism and the 
Holocaust. The collection is currently in excess of 4,000 files -- 
15,000 pages of standard text. McVay (and some scores of volunteers) 
can be found daily responding to hatemongers in Internet's newsgroups.

All this has led to McVay, 55, being dubbed "the premier authority on 
fighting hate on the Internet" by Canada's press.

I've followed Ken's online career since 1991, back when he was just 
"one of the gang" posting replies to Nazi apologia and Holocaust 
denial crossposted across the breadth of net.news. (Back in the 
palaeo-netic days of '91 there was no newsgroup called alt.revisionism 
and the Holocaust flame wars were everywhere, generally driving 
newsgroup readers to distraction.) eye published my two-part article 
about McVay and alt.revisionism back in the fall of '94.

In refuting Holocaust deniers, McVay began transcribing sections of 
documentation -- official SS documents, death camp commandant letters, 
diary notes, etc. -- demonstrating the systematic campaign of human 
extermination based upon socio-genetic theories that remain at the 
heart of Nazi ideology.

These transcriptions soon swelled. Soon people were writing him 
personal email asking for specific files, which began to take up too 
much time. So McVay made do with the net technology at hand to hack 
together an email server -- you could send email messages to his file 
system and automatically request documentation of interest.

When WWW servers finally became popularized, the west coast denizen 
and some online comrades, like U.S. citizen Jamie McCarthy, began 
retooling the delivery of the increasingly swollen database. Thus was 
born the most important Canadian contribution to the net in 1995 -- 
the Nizkor Project.

McVay and McCarthy's efforts aren't important just because they combat 
the sort of Holocaust amnesia that affects our depoliticized culture 
(nizkor is Hebrew for "we will remember"), but also because it proves 
that one has to rethink the nature of censorship.

McVay and company remain a stellar example of why speech -- not 
censorship -- is the way to fight the occult-phrenology masquerading 
as Nazi social science in an info medium. Rather than unleashing the 
Brain Police to wrap gags around the throats of otherwise oddball Nazi 
apologists, the net's collection of Holocaust historians have 
demonstrated that the medium exposes and punishes shoddy research (and 
outright lies).

McVay says the initial flock of "academic" Holocaust deniers (Bradley 
Smith, etc.) have all apparently given up and retreated from 
alt.revisionism -- leaving just the yahoos who invariably reduce 
Holocaust researchers to "Jew lovers."

The Internet generally, and the Nizkor Project specifically, is a 
Holocaust denier's worst nightmare, because the evidence simply 
overwhelms the poorly researched handful of pamphlets and books held 
up by deniers.

For his work, McVay was also awarded the 1995 B'nai Brith Media Human 
Rights Award last week in Winnipeg. He was awarded the Order of 
British Columbia last year.

Let us add that we come not to merely applaud McVay's work, but to 
facilitate it -- eye plans to take some load off his web server by 
creating a mirror site in Toronto to serve eastern North America. 
Details will be forthcoming.

                   HOW EYE.NET OUTLIVED THE SPADINA

It started innocently enough in March, 1994. eye managing editor Bill 
Reynolds, Internex Online president David Mason and I -- your friendly 
neighborhood starving freelance writer -- sat around a second pitcher 
of draft served up by the Spadina Hotel Holy Man and Waiter, Gus.

eye was the first print publication in Canada to make the transition 
to the globespanning network of networks. That's one for the Canadian 
journalism history books. And we haven't stopped to catch our 
collective breath.

More than a few netters predicted it was just a matter of time before 
the eye.NET project would be squashed like a roach. Well, it's two 
years this week since eye officially came online.

The global economy continues to sink into oblivion, Bob Rae has 
retired to his middle-class-socialist memoirs, every single Toronto 
sports team sucks, the CBC continues to be skinned alive -- and, most 
tragically, the Spadina Hotel has gone bust. But eye is still online 
and going strong.

                 THE LITTLE NET PUBLICATION THAT GREW

I actually have a staff now, as opposed to marching around like a one-
man band, clanging cymbals, answering email, formatting text/image 
files, jackhammering out web hierarchies, slaving over Corel Draw, 
with whatever body parts were currently unemployed.

Instead of eye being ridiculed for publishing freely in a free medium, 
the rest of the publishing industry decided to catch up. Now most 
major newspapers and mags are on the web. (Rumor even has it that Now 
might finally be coming online! Imagine that!)

And so today our once tiny site stands at around 300 megs of rip-
snortin' essential-to-your-existence information. ('Course, that size 
introduces "web vertigo" -- the feeling of being lost in cyberspace -- 
but that's a story for another day...).

Aside from eye Weekly and the eyeSITE Awards, eye.NET features: . 
thousands more online links from around the world, the kind likely to 
interest the fine upstanding type of citizen who would read eye, at 
http://www.eye.net/Misc/Netsites ; . complete listings plus 
interactive movie maps to point-and-click through Metro-area movie 
houses;

* "Netology 101," your guide to cyberspace lifeforms;

* State-of-the-art music/song files from Toronto's coolest indie bands 
(like Len and Trans Love Airways) and Toronto's top music archive 
Virtual Noise;

* the online sports mag Competitor, "Toronto's online source for 
sports";. the Embarrass Harris information centre;

* and starting next week, the Howling In The Wires cyberzine.

And the next two years? Who knows, but either HTML coughs up some 
serious structural improvements or its sorry ass is gonna be booted 
back into the hell which spawned it. HTML is akin to a bicycle -- 
great for navigating the downtown fast and efficiently, but pathetic 
if you plan to navigate the country. It's time for air travel, so 
let's see if we can make this custom-hacked eye.NET go-cart hit delta-
V in '96...

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