States that there has been a trend for publications in the Asia‐Pacific region to move to a combined print and electronic medium, in an effort to achieve the goals of social equity and increased exposure to the worldwide community through the World Wide Web (WWW). Reviews some of the mechanisms by which this transition can be evaluated with respect to these two goals, both economically, but more importantly, in terms of user‐behaviour recorded WWW server access logs. The auditing of these logs facilitates new forms of market research which are impossible to conduct on traditional paper publications, as objective, quantitative information about usage patterns can be measured directly from key variables such as country of origin, most popular content pages, and typical access errors. It is argued that these audits can be used effectively for future planning, developing popular content areas, and creating publicity policy for electronic publications. The transition to a joint paper and electronic format for the South Pacific Journal of Psychology is presented in a three‐month case study, with important issues, such as the importance of indigenous contributions, being resolved using statistics computed from the server access logs.
The Internet is a potentially non-coercive technology which has the capacity to facilitate the development and dissemination of locally-relevant and culturally-appropriate discourse. Many countries, especially those in Europe, have moved to utilise the Internet as a resource for expressing and revitalising their autochthonous languages, in response to cultural pressures from globalisation. However, there has been little evaluation of whether the Internet might give rise to a renaissance of indigenous language use in the postcolonial Asia-Pacific region. In this paper, we examine the case of the Philippines, which this year celebrates a centenary of independence from Spain, to determine whether introduction of the Internet has in fact enhanced the provision of indigenous language information services. We sampled 1% of the Internet sites listed in a popular search engine, in each second-level domain (educational, commercial, government and non-government organisations), and found very little evidence of indigenous language use in any of the sites in these categories. This suggests that the Internet has not yet realised its potential as a medium for indigenous language use in the Philippines, but that greater awareness of its capabilities in this arena might change the situation in the future.
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