Digital Universe opens for public tryout

Recruiting the stewards
For years now, Digital Universe has been enlisting a cadre of expert "stewards" from the academic community, to supervise information portals on a wide variety of subjects. One of the stewards is climate specialist Robert Corell, who presided over the National Science Foundation's Earth sciences program for 13 years and is now organizing the Digital Universe's information on Arctic climate.

Corell told MSNBC.com that he gladly answered the call: "I said this is absolutely what is needed in the world of the Internet, because so many colleagues would call me and say, 'Bob, such-and-such on the Internet is garbage," he recalled.

The stewards for the broadest areas — the cosmos, the natural world and human health — can in turn enlist others to steward subcategories, and so on. Corell said the Digital Universe would handle controversies such as the global warming debate much as they're handled in the academic world. For example, if Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who's skeptical about human-caused global warming, has a perspective that passes scientific muster, "it'll be put out there," Corell said.

Firmage and his associates say they are pioneering a new financial model for Internet information as well as a new model for research and distribution. The Digital Universe's portals will be advertising-free and managed by a nonprofit foundation. The company Firmage set up to develop the software platform, ManyOne Networks, will be handed over to a foundation as well.

Instead of relying on ad revenue, as most online ventures do — or soliciting donations, as Wikipedia is doing — Firmage hopes the new venture will generate revenue from "premium" services such as chatrooms or Internet audio and video guides, as well as from providing optional e-mail, dial-up and broadband access at monthly rates ranging from $7.95 to $49.95.

"The really unique twist in this business model is that 50 percent of the net revenue from all subscription levels is devoted to finance the partners who are helping to build and distribute the Digital Universe. ... So this provides a democratic financial model that is capable of supporting over time the thousands and thousands of people who get involved in building this," Firmage said.

Specialized software
For now, however, only a couple of dozen of the Digital Universe's portals have been built out, and many more stewards still have to be recruited. "There are more than 1,000 portals mapped so far ... that is, navigable but without much content," Firmage said.

Right now, the portals basically offer up collections of links to Web resources, ranging from slick interactives to clunky articles from the Russian newspaper Pravda.

Digital Universe A screen shot from the ManyOne browser shows a selection of the online icons linked to portals in the Digital Universe.

Users also will have to download ManyOne's customized version of the Mozilla Web browser in order to view the content, offered in a 100-megabyte installation at DigitalUniverse.net. By early summer, the Digital Universe will be accessible through all browser platforms, and not just through the ManyOne browser, Firmage said.

Once you get your account up and running, you navigate through a graphical "tree" of portals to get to the subject you want to explore. The user interface features, like the content areas, may not be quite ready for prime time — but Firmage said that will change as the months go on.

Over the longer term, Firmage envisions the creation of clickable 3-D graphical encyclopedias that would let users zoom in from a virtual human to an individual cell, or zoom out from a virtual solar system to the whole galaxy — with links to high-quality references presented along each step of the way. Even the beta-test demonstrations give Firmage confidence that the Encyclopedia Galactica vision will someday become a reality.

"I've showed this to many teachers over the past couple of years, and many parents," he said, "and in some cases — I'm not exaggerating here — some of these folks break down and cry when they see it, because they recognize something that could profoundly change the way the public learns."

An earlier version of this report cited an inaccurate figure for the investment in the Digital Universe.

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