- (a bit more adventurous) setting up an ISPN (international standard person number), similar to ISBN (international standard book number) and ISSN (international standard serial number), which identifies a person, so that references to authors in the labels are less dependent on changes in e-mail addresses and home pages (as long as people keep their addresses in the ISPN database up-to-date, of course). = What practical solutions would you suggest for the growth of a multilingual Web? - At the author end: better education of web authors to use combinations of modalities to make communication more effective across language barriers (and not just for cosmetic reasons); - at the server end: more translation facilities à la AltaVista (quality not impressive, but always better than nothing); - at the browser end: more integrated translation facilities (especially for the smaller languages), and more quick integrated dictionary lookup facilities. = What is your best experience with the Internet? One night I heard on a foreign radio station a fragment of a song and the name of a person, and using only the Internet I was able to: - identify the person as the composer; - find the title of the song; - confirm that this was actually the song I'd heard; - discover that it was part of a musical; - find the title of the CD-set of the musical; - buy the CDs; - find the website of the musical; - find the country and place where the musical was still being performed, including when; - find the phone number and opening hours of the booking office; - get a map of the city, and directions to get to the theatre. I could've done my hotel and flight bookings via the Internet too, but it wasn't necessary in this case. The only thing I could not do was the actual booking, because they didn't accept Internet bookings from abroad at the time, for security reasons. I had a wonderful time at the theatre, and I don't think this would've been possible without the Internet! = And your worst experience? Nothing specific, but there are a few repetitive ones: - unsolicited commercial e-mails; - web pages full of ads; - pages overloaded with irrelevant, time-consuming graphics; - dead links. *Interview of June 1st, 2001 = How much do you still work with paper? I use paper a lot. All important documents are printed out, as they are a lot easier to consult on paper (easier to browse, never a dead battery). I don't think that this is going to change for quite a while. = What do you think about e-books? Still a long way to go before reading from a screen feels as comfortable as reading a book. = What is your definition of cyberspace? For me the cyberspace is the part of the universe (including people, machines and information) that I can reach from behind my desk. = How would you define the information society? An information society is a society: