How do they look in the Internet?

It is open secret that every year high technologies enter our daily lives more and more. It seems that it was not so long ago, only lessthan fifty years, when people would visit their neighbor in a communal apartment to watch his television set. Another neighbor could cause everybody’s jealousy by possessing another high tech miracle, a refrigerator. With time, VCRs, cellular phones, and computers became part of everyday life, the latter giving birth to the Internet’s worldwide web. However, it makes no sense to plunge into history; suffice it to recall the following: today the number of Internet users throughout the world exceeds half a billion, with the number of various web sites increasing virtually every day. Every company, every publication, and every more or less renowned person strives to get its own web address, not to mention such large conglomerates of companies, publications, and cities. It is comforting to see that in this respect Ukraine is not lagging behind the West, with virtually every settlement in this country having not only geographical coordinates but also constant residence on the Internet, or, to put it simple, a web site.

Web surfing the network in Ukraine can keep one busy more than one day. Every oblast center has over a hundred sites, not to mention Kyiv where virtually every city rayon has its web representation. The range of web resources is the broadest: from official sites of city and oblast administrations to portals of a purely entertaining character, which offer room for communication, placing classified advertisements, and playing online games. Moreover, the ua.net cities tend to consolidate: there is the Cities of Ukraine project uniting around twenty sites of Ukrainian cities, among which are, in addition to big cities, Bershady, Boyarka, Feodosiya, Dzhankoi, and even Vyshneve, Kyiv oblast.

Many big cities try to create a purely informational resource that represents in fact a complete picture of their social and cultural life. Note, for example, the All about Lviv (www.ipk.polynet.lviv.ua), All Kharkiv (www.all.kharkov.ua), or Odessa Portal (praktika.com.ua). These sites boast the special feature that they are user-friendly. One can find everything here: from the latest city news to advice as to where to spend spare time.

Perhaps the most interesting are web-portraits of small cities, where one can clearly see their prominent features. For instance, Myrhorod (www.mirgorod.com.ua) is very proud of its resorts, mineral water, the Sorochyntsy Fair, and their people’s deputy and SDPU(o) member, Hennady Rudenko. Zhmenrynka, Vinnytsia oblast (zhmerinka-city.narod.ru) is a railway pearl with century-long history and a school page. Popasna, Luhansk oblast (www.popasnaya.net), has created a very powerful and beautiful site where one can obtain complete information about this city with a population of 26,000. Creators of the Yasynovata (Donetsk oblast) city site (www.yasinovataya.share.dp.ua) wanted to picture their city as a “peaceful abode,” “a model of calmness and nonchalance — like in heaven.”

“Everyone has his own idea about it,” the Myrhorod site says. “Quiet or noisy, old or young, provincial or urbanized, buried in verdure or sparkling with mirror storefronts and neon signboards... No matter how far away you are from it now; what matters is that you love it. Since it is Your City where you were born and grew up. There is one more thing uniting them in spite of their differences: they are all Ukraine’s Cities...”