WEB FEAT

HAPPY Irish Times reader Barbara J Wiliiams from California had dreamed of a trip to Ireland all her life and about 10 months ago she started making plans to actually do it. For a start, several times a day, she took to visiting The Irish Times's website on her computer.

Specifically, she would look for the nearly live picture of O'Connell Bridge - shot by a camera on top of the Ballast Office and updated on the site every 30 seconds - to "check out the weather and the activity on the street".

Finally, three weeks ago, Barbara found herself here, along with her sister, standing on the actual O'Connell Bridge. She takes up the story, in an e mail to the newspaper.

I ran across the street to a phone booth and called my daughter in Los Angeles and had her go to your site. Then I ran back across the street and stood under the green sign there, so she could see me in Ireland. She took a screen photo with her Mac and emailed it to me so I could have it on my computer at home. We thought it was just great." That's what Barbara wrote to us.

Since The Irish Times completed its move into cyberspace (a fourth floor office on the corner of Westmoreland Street and Aston Quay) a year ago, it has been making a lot of new friends around the world, like Barbara.

There is, of course, more to the paper's website than a nearly live picture of O'Connell Bridge (fans will be pleased to know the bridge is going completely live in the near future). There is the newspaper itself, of course, much of which is now included in the daily 4 a.m. web edition, whence it can be read instantly around the world - on office computers in Tokyo or on home computers in New York, where it is still the night before.

There is also an archive, comprising all editions of the past two years. There are sites within the site, celebrating special occasions, from St Patrick's Day, to the general election, to Bloomsday. But above all - and this is accident as much as design (although the designers will probably protest otherwise) - The Irish Times on the Web has become a forum for communication from and among the Irish diaspora.

It goes beyond the diaspora, in fact. A glance through recent e-mails shows one from a student in Kyoto asking the meaning of the mysterious word "gardai" which she found throughout the newspaper. (One can only wonder what she made of other uniquely Irish terms like "Dail", "Tanaiste" and "Jackie Healy Rae".)

Another is a request for a job from a Swedish journalism student, who has no apparent links with Ireland but who points out that her qualifications include ability to drive a snow plough; presumably, she has not been checking the weather on O'Connell Bridge, unless she intended to use the plough to move traffic.

But an Irish thread runs through most of the contributions: from the St Patrick's Society in Botswana seeking an entertainer for next March (free flight but only modest fee offered); to an Irish student in a library in Malmo merely reminiscing about the smell of coffee beans from a well known cafe on Westmoreland Street.

Many e mailers are more reflective or argumentative than this (crippling modesty prevents the team which produces the web edition from mentioning that most correspondents confine themselves to gushing praise of the site). For instance, the discussion group which was part of the Bloomsday package provoked a lively exchange among emigres on the Joycean themes of exile, begrudgery and the meaning of Irishness.

The debate was overtaken by the news of the IRA murders in Lurgan, giving an edge to some of the subsequent comments. But a typically double edged contribution came from a US based emigrant who argued: "Joyce loved and hated Ireland as only an expatriate Paddy can ... But few among us don't come to look on Ireland with something like tender regard as time passes. I think a lot of that regard shows through in Ulysses Then the sting in the tale. "Not that I'll ever go back, mind."

It must be stressed that the website was not designed as an electronic companion to President Robinson's candle in the window, but the presence of that other Ireland abroad, especially in the US, has certainly fuelled its development. It is maybe no coincidence that the only sites outside America honoured at the World Online Newspaper Service Awards earlier this year were those of The Irish Times and the Jerusalem Post.

The defining, moment so far for the IT operation was the recent general election. Not only was interest huge among the Irish abroad, but with the counting happening on a Saturday and no Sunday newspaper from which to draw, the web people were largely on their own in getting a Sunday edition out.

The journalistic part of this exercise was helped by technology such as the digital camera - allowing photography which can he on the web site within minutes of the camera clicking. The pictures may be crude, but they captured the changing face of (and changing faces in) count centres like Dublin's RDS on that long, fraught night.

THE election coverage drew a million "hits" on the web site on Monday, June 9th, equalling the previous best for the special St Patrick's Day edition. (For the uninitiated, a "hit" happens each time somebody somewhere clicks his/her mouse on a part of the site, and is still the simplest measure of interest levels. It goes without saying that an average person will be responsible for multiple hits, so the measurement is far from perfect. But the fact that the trend is steadily upwards - the latest monthly total is 14 million and rising - is a real indication of something, while new software allows more and more accurate assessment of readership numbers.)

The Irish Times on the Web is the busiest of all Irish web sites but it is not the only Irish newspaper online. Northern dailies the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish News have been there for some time, the Irish Independent is planning a presence soon and several provincials are also up and running. Where the IT was one of the first 30 newspapers to go online just three years ago, there are some 3,000 there now, and what seemed like an exotic offshoot of the real business of newspaper production has become mainstream. This truth extends to the personnel too. A tendency to refer to them as "the web people" has contributed to a certain mystique, but contrary to the suspicion among print journalists, the people who work on the web edition seem normal. One was working in his bare feet when I visited the office, granted, but they were all quick to reassure me that the job is "not Star Trek."

Even the most hopeless technophobe (I know, I was that technophobe) can find his way around the web site, once in. And next time I cross O'Connell Bridge and see Americans running back and forth across the street and then waving at the top of a building, I'll know exactly what's going on.