From waking up Ireland to the possibilities of the Internet, Gerry McGovern has become adviser to the world on the Web's development.

The former rock and technology journalist now heads the influential Nua (Gaelic for new) Internet consultancy, famed across the industry for its weekly Internet Surveys, collating information on the demographics and trends of the Net

He has also come up with a classification system for the Web and has just published a book, The Caring Economy. It suggests businesses have to think about people and how they interact if they hope to succeed in the Digital Age.

Local Ireland a model for the Web

"It all started around 1994," he told News Online on a visit to London to promote the book, "I wrote to the Irish government and told them they should do a report on the Internet.

"They agreed and asked me to do it. That became the basis for a lot of research, the government became the first customer of what was a one-man consultancy."

He got two others interested in the business and then came up with the idea of a country portal for Ireland, which has become Local Ireland. The principles behind the portal have become the core of his company and a model for the Web.

Library system adopted

Back in 1995, Mr McGovern felt organising data and information overload would become huge problems on the Net. His solution was to follow the same principles as libraries and introduce a kind of Dewey Decimal pre-categorisation system for the Web.

"We looked at creating a total environment for information. We wanted every publisher to apply this basic system equivalent to the ISBN/ISSN system, we felt the Internet had to adopt this, the post-categorisation of search engines and directories does not work, only around 16% of the Web is being indexed, according to one survey."

Nua was able to apply its principles to the Local Ireland portal. It created categories and sub-categories for everything it could think of down to a type of donkey. But none of the categories became active or visible until data was entered for them.

Ownership and approval

Local Ireland has 2,000 geographic localities and a "co-operative ownership". Anyone wanting to submit an event for the site has to fill in a detailed template that accurately categorises it and the submission is then studied by a local approver for inclusion in a particular section.

While the process appears long and painstaking, Mr McGovern says the ground-up approach has produced a tremendous database that fulfils the three properties of information: content, structure and publication.

"Publishers are generally very bad at handling their archive, if you don't let your audience know that information exists, then you've essentially wasted your time."

Nua believes that every country requires a similar information structure to the Local Ireland model and businesses can benefit as well: the concept has been spun off into Nua Publish software.

Nua grows with the Net

Nua's rise to prominence as a source for Internet statistics dates back to Gerry McGovern's original attempts to research the Net for the Irish government: "It was a big job to try to find statistics and I thought lots of others must be trying to do the same thing. If we did it right, it would be a big way of building our brand."

The service was launched in June 1995 and now reaches more than 200,000 people a week through the Website and an e-mail newsletter. Nua has picked up clients from its subscribers, such as Lucent and Procter & Gamble in Europe and has grown from three people to a hundred.

Mr McGovern thinks Nua's measurement of the size of the Net is a fair assessment and a natural trend has appeared. Its latest figures estimate 179m were online worldwide by June 1999.

Humans not machines important

His book, The Caring Economy, is not a socialist agenda but about getting the focus right in the digital age: it is people, not tools and processes that are important, he says.

"Computers delivered us a six-day not a three-day week. The Leisure Society, the paperless office never came, the promise of technology has never been fulfilled."

"You will always need human involvement in defining processes, human involvement in online transactions is being brought back.

"Customer relationships are so important. Supermarkets, for instance, own their customers, but the worldwide brands they sell have given up their right to interact with their consumers and have put themselves in a weak position.