Web-posted Sunday, May 12, 1996

M is for the modem that she gave me.

O means only that she's getting on-line.

M is for her multimedia Web site.

Put them all together and they spell Mom.

She means the World Wide Web to me.

Okay, so it doesn't scan. What do you expect? This is a computer column, not the poetry corner.

But, hey, Mother's Day is upon us and so it's time to talk about the rather stunning presence in cyberspace of the first third of that great American triad, Mom, apple pie and the Fourth of July.

This column, by the way, stands four square and firmly in favor of all three and you may quote me on that.

Mother's Day is an excellent occasion to ponder the happy news that a substantial and growing number of women are getting into the personal computer scene, which for far too long had been the digital domain of rowdy young male animals between the ages of 18 and 34.

The evidence that they're starting to pull down the Cheryl Tiegs posters in cyberspace comes from two highly reliable sources.

The first is the most recent A.C. Nielsen Media Research survey of personal technology habits of Americans, showing, among other increases in technology use by women, that 41 percent of the people now using on-line services are female. This is a huge increase over just a year ago when many estimates held that only about 20 percent of on-line users were women.

The second source of evidence comes simply from cruising all the Mom-oriented sites that have sprung up on the World Wide Web.

The women on the Internet do far more than post these family-focused Web sites that are becoming known as "Mom pages," of course. That Nielsen study, for example, found that women tend to use the Internet more for e-mail and business research than do men and that men greatly outdo women in such recreational pursuits as surfing Web pages and playing games.

But to mark Mother's Day, I'll tell you about what a fairly large number of Internet-savvy women are doing in taking their roles as mothers onto the Web. Then I'll lay out a whole bunch of interesting demographic information from Nielsen showing that the digital distaff finally is coming into its own.

As you might expect, modem-savvy mothers are very much like women everywhere when they do things in mommy mode. They use these Mom sites to talk about kids, cooking and clothes.

These are homemakers into writing HTML scripts, the relatively simple documents containing the computer instructions that one must use to create an Internet home page.

Along with sitting down with their kids and helping them with their coloring books and crayons, the HTML-capable homemakers also get the kids to scan in family photos and even type in some of their own stories for posting on a family Web page.

In essence, these family Internet projects amount to doing the same sort of things that huge corporations--such as the owner of this newspaper--do in creating their various World Wide Web sites filled with multimedia features and the other fruits of a modern desktop computer.

The biggest kick that most families get is that they can post the same sort of pictures, sounds, video clips and elegant text files on their own pages as can big-time professionals.

Then grandparents, aunts, uncles and other friends can share the fun. These home pages are real homes and many of them welcome the whole world.

One of the more enjoyable has been posted by Tane Tachyon, a mother and computer whiz who has put her two children and herself on the Web by taking all the things that other moms do with their kids and doing them on-line (http://deepthought.armory.com:80/tachyon/).

The tone is set by Tachyon's choice of a background for her home page, which appears to be the blue swirling waters of a Tidy Bowl-cleaned toilet.

Her various hot links are keyed to icons of little "scrubbing bubbles" reminiscent of the tub- and tile-cleaner commercials.

Most of the hot links refer to her two children, Sam, 7, and Arthur, 20 months.

Since Arthur is still a baby, that's what his pages are, Arthur's baby book. Like all baby books, Arthur's has a chart showing his development starting from when he was a newborn, on Sept. 20, 1994, when he was 22 inches and weighed 7 pounds and 4 ounces.

On March 8, Arthur fed himself using a spoon for the first time (noodles), reads the latest entry in the baby book. On Jan. 15, he wore his first pair of shoes (sandals). On July 5, 1995, he had a fever of 105. His mom simply wrote alongside that entry "scary."

Sam's pages list his computer games. They also include little stories about his board games. He has done--with mom's help, of course--a page devoted to his Lego creations.

This family is one of uncounted thousands that have taken to the Web. Proud new dads post Web pages in lieu of "it's a boy" or "it's a girl" birth announcements. Kids turn homework into Web pages and give the teacher the address. One little girl's Web site includes a page devoted to her favorite toothbrush.

Ann Boccio, another modem mom who provides particular insight into the phenomenon, has built a page around her kids, hubby and hearth titled "Web Page of the Mad Housewife" (http://pages.prodigy.com/annieb/). She ponders the question of what to call this new phenomenon and says she chose what she did after considering "Cyber-Mom," "Nerd-Mom," "Web-Mom," "Hypertext- Mom," "Geek-Mom," "http://Mom" and "Mom-can-I-use-the-computer-yet-Mom."

Boccio's page is filled with stuff about her sons, Andrew and Nickey, and also features a huge number of hot links to other Mom-linked sites all across the planet.

Following those links is a real treat and something that moms--and dads--everywhere should try to do. As you might expect, these pages include a wealth of advice about child rearing, recipes, sewing tips, homework help and a goodly number of pages where mothers just get together and talk about the business of being a mom.

Meanwhile, that Nielsen survey documents the demographics that have brought this transformation in the mood and gender of today's technology scene. The report is at http://www.nielsenmedia.com/.

In an extensive telephone poll conducted this spring, Nielsen found that women made up 41 percent of all users of on-line services and are responsible for 37 percent of total usage.

This is a major increase from a year ago when CompuServe officials were estimating that about 20 percent of their customers were women.

All told, Nielsen found, 37 million people in the United States and Canada have access to the Internet and 24 million of them have used the Net in the past three months.

The Internet users averaged 5 hours 28 minutes a week on-line, and Nielsen noted that this means that total Internet usage in the U.S. and Canada is equivalent to the total amount of time spent playing rented videotapes.

While women account for 41 percent of customers at formal on-line services, they also account for 34 percent of everybody on the once utterly male-dominated Internet as a whole as well.

This, of course, is still a badly lopsided picture, but, as the data show, it is getting better by the week. And what better way to note the improvement than a bit of Mother's Day web surfing? Ladies, start your search engines.

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Binary Beat readers can participate in the column at its home on the World Wide Web at http://www.chicago.tribune.com/coffee/ or e-mail jcoates1@aol.com.