up-to-date, of course).

= What practical solutions would you suggest for the growth of a multilingual
Web?

- At the author end: better education of web authors to use combinations of
modalities to make communication more effective across language barriers (and
not just for cosmetic reasons);

- at the server end: more translation facilities a la AltaVista (quality not
impressive, but always better than nothing);

- at the browser end: more integrated translation facilities (especially for the
smaller languages), and more quick integrated dictionary lookup facilities.

= What is your best experience with the Internet?

One night I heard on a foreign radio station a fragment of a song and the name
of a person, and using only the Internet I was able to:

- identify the person as the composer;

- find the title of the song;

- confirm that this was actually the song I'd heard;

- discover that it was part of a musical;

- find the title of the CD-set of the musical;

- buy the CDs;

- find the website of the musical;

- find the country and place where the musical was still being performed,
including when;

- find the phone number and opening hours of the booking office;

- get a map of the city, and directions to get to the theatre.

I could've done my hotel and flight bookings via the Internet too, but it wasn't
necessary in this case.

The only thing I could not do was the actual booking, because they didn't accept
Internet bookings from abroad at the time, for security reasons.

I had a wonderful time at the theatre, and I don't think this would've been
possible without the Internet!

= And your worst experience?

Nothing specific, but there are a few repetitive ones:

- unsolicited commercial e-mails;

- web pages full of ads;

- pages overloaded with irrelevant, time-consuming graphics;

- dead links.

*Interview of June 1st, 2001

= How much do you still work with paper?

I use paper a lot. All important documents are printed out, as they are a lot
easier to consult on paper (easier to browse, never a dead battery). I don't
think that this is going to change for quite a while.

= What do you think about e-books?

Still a long way to go before reading from a screen feels as comfortable as
reading a book.

= What is your definition of cyberspace?

For me the cyberspace is the part of the universe (including people, machines
and information) that I can reach from behind my desk