Today's Honorary Subscriber: What It's All About

In the beginning, there was Edupage

In about 1996, I subscribed to Edupage, a summary of news about information technology, provided three times a week as a service of EDUCAUSE, a consortium of leading colleges and universities seeking to transform education through the use of information technology. Delivered via e-mail, the summary contains news stories in bite-sized chunks. Latterly, links to the complete story, or other sources of information are included, inviting you to go and find out more if interested.

The Honorary Subscriber came about at the end of the letter, where instructions on how to subscribe were given, in the following form:

TO SUBSCRIBE TO EDUPAGE
Send mail to listproc@educom.unc.edu with the message:
subscribe edupage Leon Foucault
(if your name is Leon Foucault; otherwise, substitute your own name).
If you have subscription problems, send mail to manager@educom.unc.edu .

This became known as the Honorary Subscriber, and soon after the newsletter's inception came mini-biographies of the person in question. It is these biographies of which this section of giles-guthrie.com is built.

I've been a subscriber for several years now and rate it as a top source of information for anyone interested in I.T. This page is a homage to Edupage, and is produced with their blessing. You should subscribe, by the way. Information is given in bite-sized chunks that give you a vice-like hold on I.T. happenings.

Brave new century

In April 1999, John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas, editors of Edupage, split from Educom, and started their own daily publication, NewsScan . It has continued the tradition of Today's Honorary Subscriber , and continues the fine traditions of Edupage. To subscribe to the text version, click here to send a message to NewsScan@NewsScan.com To subscribe to the HTML version, click here to send a message to NewsScan-html@NewsScan.com, or check out this little frog.

Recently, John Gehl and Suzanne Douglas included a section, reproduced here:

WHAT MAKES AN HONORARY SUBSCRIBER HONORARY?
Since we've included in today's [29-03-2001] mailbag a complaint about our selection of George M. Pullman as an Honorary Subscriber, maybe we should take a moment explain why we pick our Hon Subs and what we mean by the word "Honorary." We pick them mainly because their lives are interesting - and not necessarily because they were entirely wonderful human beings (though, of course, some of them were). And we use the word "Honorary" not to suggest that these special subscribers are exemplary in every way, but to acknowledge that they are not "real" subscribers. But of course the main reason they do not have real subscriptions is that most of them are dead. Fair enough. We're sure that if they weren't dead they would be regular rather than honorary subscribers, because having your own real subscription to NewsScan Daily is what life is all about! (As you, our friends and subscribers, already know.)