Time has put my journalism studies at St. Bonaventure University into an ever more pertinent context. The classic journalistic technique of using "five w's and an h" for a news story to my thinking may have relevance to today's internet/computer communications.

For the novice, the five w's are: who, what, when, where and why; the h is: how. Each news article written is supposed to contain them.

"Who" is simply the names of the people involved in the report. It also may be thought of as the "author/creator" of the newsworthy actions. "What" is the newsworthy activity itself ... the general subject area and what we label it.

"When" and "where" place the event in geographical and historical context, that's fairly basic. "Why" and "How" are a little more obtuse. I take "why" as the apparent intent of the newsworthy action, the "goal," so to speak. And "how" is the apparent method of the action, the "journey."

This dichotomy of a news story is, at its root, the skeleton of all human communication. Inadvertently, we all use the "five w's and an h" to judge the relevance to us of any reported event.

Wouldn't it make sense to include them in a small hexagonal database wherein each of the six has a "25 words or less" field of, say, 128 two-byte Unicode letters or spaces? That searchable less-than-2K header may prove more valuable than the "full-text" searches and popularity algorithms used presently.

Additionally, as GPS becomes more prevalent, the "when" and "where" may become automated, using the atomic clock signal and triangulation methods contained in that technology.

The ramifications of such a W5H header relative to email spam, attachments, who-created-what-first, etc. would be fun to contemplate. I see it as the internet's automated version of a notary public function.