Times are tough for dot-coms that rely on advertising revenues.

Some sites appear to be coping by increasing the quantity of material--"content"--they make available.

Quantity is impressive but it's not really what you want.What matters is the quality of what you find for any given amount of browsing or searching.

The useful stuff is information.The other stuff is noise.

There's too much noise on the Web.Anybody with a service to flog or a product to market is writing down their sales pitch, running it through the spelling- and grammar-checker, and distributing their "article" or "press release" to hundreds of willing sites that eagerly post it.

The information-to-noise ratio measures one aspect of quality.Add noise to a site and that ratio goes down.Remove the noise and the ratio goes up.It's that simple.

We aim to keep our info:noise ratio high.We do this by careful selection, review, and editing.Most of what hits our in-boxes never sees the light of day, at least not on our site.What makes it through our noise filter becomes my responsibility as editor.

I discharge that responsibility with a lot of red ink and close collaboration with our authors.Our contributing editors review this work to keep me on track (and humble).

Regardless of what ensues in the marketplace, Directions Magazine intends to remain responsive to your needs and to provide high quality features and columns for you.

I hope you will find that quality here.E-mail me and let me know.Help us at Directions make this the spatial technology resource you turn to every week.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to tell a friend.

--Bill Huber
Acting Editor

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