I have the pleasure to announce the first birthday of the MHEG-5 Users
Group. According to the maillog: the first message for
mheg-ug@fokus.gmd.de is dated to 13th Jan 1997.
We have had some 6000 accesses for the "Index" WWW page in the last
year, which gives an average of 16 per day. Not too much, compared to
Microsofts site, all sites with "xxx" in the domain name and similar
sites. But not too bad either, since MHEG is not that much of interest
for avarage WWW surfers, and our audience is very focused on this issue.
I would like to send congratulations especially for those of you who
have been here from the start. The MUG evolved from the MHEG-5
Verification Group, and quite many people are still in this business.
Today we have 70+ people on the mailling list, and seeing the most
recent developments for MHEG usage in the "real world" I would expect
some more to come in the future. I also want to thank the SMTP/WWW site
maintainer at GMD FOKUS for the reliable hosting of the MUG.
Due to that occasion I have started to redesign the site a bit: Very old
(DIS) stuff is gone, and activities which have been envisaged in the
beginning but never made it to reality have been deleted. This is for
example the initial idea to have "free" software or test objects at the
MUG. I think this is due to the grown commercial interest in MHEG.
Companies and developers obviously tend to keep their stuff on their own
WWW site, and provide a link to the MUG. So, MHEG technology moves from
Research to Business, which is not a bad thing for us. Looking at the
MUGs links page you find those references to applications and software.
The general look-and-feel of the site remains, and the maillist is more
in the focus. We will have in the very near future automatic mailindex
production, and I want to move "old" messages to another page. Due to
internal problems here at FOKUS I was not able to do that in time for
this occasion.
I have also worked on the FAQ: Obsolete questions are deleted. The
documents archive is also cleaner: Intermediate docs and very old stuff
is removed.
The old site is still available at http://www.fokus.gmd.de/ovma/mug.old
but this will be removed in some weeks. Comments on the site design and
the general MUG management are welcome.
Please visit the updated MUG at http://www.fokus.gmd.de/ovma/mug
I am looking forward to the second year of the MUG.
All the best for 1998 from your MUG maintainer,
- Klaus
-- GMD FOKUS German National Research Center for Information Technology Klaus Hofrichter Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31 D-10589 Berlin Germany mailto:hofrichter@fokus.gmd.de http://www.fokus.gmd.de/usr/hofrichter P: +49 30 3463 7211 Fx -8211 There is a reexamination, but no reparty