The system registers, validates and charges users across multiple unrelated publishing sites and is designed to provide third-party validation and demographic information to advertisers, said Densmore.

"Our system is the first announced publicly that permits the so-called billing of hypertext links across multiple independent Internet publishing sites," said Densmore, a formerly weekly newspaper publisher, wire-service and trade- press journalist.

Clickshare is the product of more than a year of software engineering lead by David M. Oliver, managing director- technology and a technical director at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Oliver has more than 10 years of experience with high-performance computing and network applications.

"Publishers who link a user to fewer than 100 pages of World Wide Web information per year will pay no per-user access fees at all, meaning it will cost them just $1,995 to adopt the Clickshare system," said Densmore. "For smaller publishers and ISPs, we will also allow payment for the software from anticipated royalty or commission payments. We will not let cost be a barrier to adoption of Clickshare."

A unique feature of Clickshare(sm) is the principle of automatic information brokerage under which the user's Internet service provider or home publisher receives a commission when its user purchases information from a selling publisher. In this way, Clickshare(sm) system members have an incentive to market and sell each other's information via hypertext links or other methods. Such a system has been dubbed "billable hypertext links" by some people.

For example, with the system, a selling publisher is free to chose from among at least 16 different pricing tiers for per-page sales, from as little as 10 cents. The user's home base (ISP or publisher) is responsible for collecting these payments monthly. The user's home base then forwards the majority of the total to the selling publisher via Clickshare's clearing system, and Clickshare retains a small transaction fee.

"We have discussed with likely partners and publishing members various ways to split these payments but will not formalize them until transaction processing begins," said Densmore.

Though not required specifically for the Clickshare-enhanced server, Newshare recommends that a minimum of 32MB of RAM and 1GB of hard disk storage are available on any of the hardware mentioned above. Those machines that will run full X Window System displays in addition to running the HTTP server should have a minimum 64MB of RAM.

Further, though not specifically required for the Clickshare-enhanced server, Newshare recommends that the machine running the HTTP daemon to connected to a LAN with direct attachment to a T1 rate (1.54Mb/s) Internet connection. This bandwidth may be shared with other workstations on this LAN. So-called "fractional T3" is a more ideal Internet service connection. Lower bandwidth connections to the Internet, however, are not significantly affected by the presence of Clickshare.

If you are running a commercial secure server at your site (such as Open Market or Netscape) you will need at this stage to run the Clickshare-enhanced server daemon on a separate "port." But the Clickshare daemon and the main daemon can be set up to access the same underlying information, just from a different port address (i.e., 8080 instead of 80).

We expect to negotiate the license of our code to major commercial server vendors for inclusion in their products so that running two separate server daemons won't be necessary.