Where Sci-Fi Meets The Net

Such services are only months away, and in the meantime, a growing number of mobile users are tapping into h2g2's Internet site for tourism advice, music reviews and entries on health, politics and history. The same topics are featured on other Internet sites; h2g2's appeal is that it tries to offer an unconventional approach to virtually every subject, taking cues from Adams' own sense of humor and irony. Unlike the motivations of sites that attempt to build forums and communities as a way of getting people to stay on their sites and buy more products, creating the guide is h2g2's raison d'etre. Soon h2g2 plans to introduce a premium service allowing users to receive a "smarticle," a text-based phone message summarizing sightseeing tips for a particular area, saving mobile users search time and reducing phone charges. h2g2 will make money through subscription charges and by taking a cut of mobile operators' airtime revenues, says the firm's chief operating officer, Ted Bissell. h2g2's website already boasts 55,000 regular members, with three to five times that number of people surfing the site. About 5% are accessing h2g2 through mobile phones.

How far can Adams' novels be stretched? Babel Fish--a device he describes that can be inserted into the ear to give the listener instant translation of all languages--doesn't exist. But h2g2 has licensed the Babel Fish name to a service run by search engine Alta Vista, which offers computer-based automatic translations of text in seven languages. There are plans to use that service to provide multiple-language versions of h2g2 within the next year.

Just how useful is h2g2 at this point? The guide is still patchy, largely as a result of the haphazard way that information is collected from the travels of subscribers. For example, the online guide to France contains a review of a pizza-and-pasta joint in the little-known town of Saintes in the Charente-Maritime region, but there is nothing at all on Lyons or the renowned restaurants there. And an entry for India that purports to be a list of the world's best curry houses bizarrely includes none from that country at all, while listing two in Australia, one in Canada, one in Germany and 26 in Britain.

You won't find anything about the Forbidden City or the Great Wall in the section on China, but the guide does contain useful advice about navigating the Beijing subway and bus systems. It also contains tips on drinking in Australian pubs (never leave your glass on the bar upside down unless you're prepared to duke it out with everyone in the place) and on early-morning bird watching in Sydney. And where else could you learn to navigate your way between two locations in Antarctica? "From personal experience gained while drunk and freezing, I would like to mention that if one is returning to McMurdo Station following a party at Scott Base, the road is the fastest, warmest and most direct way back to town," says an entry from Tim Smith. "Never stray from the trails--there are snow-covered crevasses concealed on each side, and people have died falling into them."