From San Diego to Evanston, Palo Alto to Washington, Mexico City to Tokyo, so much information is moving over the World Wide Web that it is difficult to fathom, fascinating to contemplate, sometimes frustrating to navigate and often rewarding to use.

    Much of what’s available on line is like junk mail: A large and free volume of junk mail is an acceptable and sometimes useful byproduct of a low-cost, reliable document-transportation system; and the good stuff you can get and send reliably in the mail is virtually unlimited.

    Likewise, the good you can find on the Web minimizes the negative. The Web is so compelling and so dynamic that everyone will be there before the Boomer generation is gone.

    The Web may reduce, but won’t eliminate the need for regular mail. And the Web may reduce but won’t eliminate the need or desirability of paper documents - love notes, letters and contracts, newspapers, magazines and books. People enjoy the reality, portability and storability of words and images on paper.

    A Powerbook is not a good bathroom or bedroom companion, which is why the Metropolitan finds its way into thousands more bathrooms than all the laptop computers in San Diego.

    We enjoy being a paper product, of being held in your hands and invited into your mind, being part of your work product and life. We consider it a privilege and responsibility. We presume you have no time to waste. We try to make your time spent with the Metropolitan worthwhile, informatively productive and sometimes entertaining. We believe the magazine, the paper product, is our first responsibility and most compelling medium of mass communication.

    But we’re mindful of other media and we’re not bad at shaping some of them, too. Just like we’re kind of good at researching and writing a printed news column, we’re not bad at researching, writing, reading and broadcasting a radio news segment. It’s called the San Diego Metropolitan Daily Business Report and it’s broadcast at about 8:25 a.m. and 5:25 p.m. on X-BACH Classical Radio 540 each business day. We’ve broadcast about 140 Daily Business Reports so far to a warm response. Thank you for listening.

    We also think we’ll be good at producing an on-line San Diego Metropolitan Magazine on the World Wide Web. We’re proud to introduce it this month at www.sandiegometro.com and we’re proud to announce that sandiegometro.com is the deepest WWW data base of public interest to be introduced from San Diego since October 1995, when the Union-Tribune went on line with Sign On San Diego.

    Sign On San Diego is a fine Web site, the best in San Diego with the broadest public appeal, including teenage hackers. We’ll try to keep the appeal of sandiegometro.com limited to San Diego business and professional people.

    How deep is our new data base? Well, it’s deeper than the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce's or Business Journal's new Web sites, combined. (The Chamber, by the way, begins publishing its venerable San Diego Economic Bulletin in the Metropolitan this month.) It’s deeper than a bottomless pit. Why, sandiegometro.com is so deep you could spend days trying to read it all and you wouldn't be done. Not including links to other helpful San Diego Web sites related to business, professions and government, we’ve put up about 1,400 pages or 15 megabytes of our own work to get you started and a nice little search engine that will help you find just about any combination of some 350,000 words (and counting).

    Of course, those words have been written by the most experienced team of business journalists in San Diego. We love our colleagues at the San Diego Union-Tribune, Business Journal, Daily Transcript and San Diego Magazine. But really, for a single team of business journalists, nothing in San Diego beats the likes of Tim McClain, Janet Lowe, Austin Lynas, Lynne Carrier, Denise Carabet, Libby Brydolf, Sandy Pasqua, Herbert Lockwood, Brage Golding, Kelly Cunningham, Pam Wilson, John Witt, Dirk Sutro, Neil Murray, Terryl Gavre, John Willett, Priscilla Lister, Larry Edwards, Rick Dower, Tony Allison, Andrea Moser, Melissa Jacobs, Patricia Buckely, Alan Nevin, Russ Valone, Gary London, Sanford Goodkin and Marilynn Boesky, together again for the first time on one single Web site. What a resource.

    On line at sandiegometro.com, you'll find more well-researched, well-written reports about current business events in San Diego than any other source, from banking to telecommunications, from the water wars to entrepreneurialism, venture capitalism, women in business, executive health, biotechnology, career advancement, tourism, you name it. And all of it now is revised not just daily, but throughout the day, with contributions coming from all of our reporters, writers and news sources in the business community. Cool, huh?

    On the technical side, the people who are making this happen are known as World Trade Internet Communications, Inc., our Web designer and protector in cyberspace led by CEO Robert Latko and his brotherly CFO Chris Latko. They founded WTIC 2-1/2 years ago as a consultancy using the Web as a point of contact and pre-contractual processing for an international garment distributor.

    "We saw an opportunity to get involved in integrating other small and mid-size manufacturers into these new technologies," says Bob Latko. "I developed the feasibility analysis and business plan for WTIC in the USC entrepreneurship program, and it’s been implemented since September of last year.

    "We’ve been working with the United Nations and World Trade Center of San Diego to develop the Global Trade Point Network, San Diego, and that’s at www.tpsd.net. The UN set up this initiative for electronic commerce, the Trade Point program. It encourages local Internet operators to organize resources, contacts and information in each region to create greater trade efficiency through the use of electronic commerce. The address for the Global Trade Point Network is www.unicc.org/untpdc/gtpnet."

    So the Metropolitan is sort of a diversion from WTIC's business plan, but it’s not every day that you’re offered the opportunity to design and introduce your town's deepest data base in the last two years. The association should pay off in prestige and greater visibility for WTIC and as a steady source of work and income.

    Working with the Latkos are a variety of geniuses: Daniel Visser'tHooft, Web page graphic designer, whose name is better known in New York arts and museum circles; Rich Wolford, Web master, who grew up amidst Haviland, Ohio corn fields, with a violin since age 3 and computers since age 8; Nick Bastin, system administrator, who allows, "I fix everything they break;" account executives Brad Dawson and Brett Frost, and marketing guru Brad Bikadi.

    WTIC uploads the online Metropolitan to four Sparc servers, the machines of choice, then to the UUnet backbone and then off into cyberspace to your home, office or wherever your laptop happens to be.

    San Diego Metropolitan Editor Tim McClain and I spent our final months at the Daily Transcript in late 1994 and early '95 helping to move our editorial product to the San Diego Source, which was, until now, San Diego’s finest Web site of interest to the business public. We at sandiegometro.com are here to prove that a fine Web site and San Diego’s most experienced business journalists are not mutually exclusive concepts.