Interactivity, reduced to its most basic form, is stimulus and response. Something stimulates you and you respond, or you stimulate something and it responds. Being interactive is what human beings were designed to do, with each other, with household pets, or with computers.

Interactivity as a teaching tool can increase retention and engagement in most subjects. In many cases an interactive presentation of material is far more effective than the presentation of information in straight text form.

Human interactivity has long been the stuff of ballads, love poems, and best-selling management books. Although it remains to be seen whether love songs will be written about touch screens, one thing is certain: computerized interactivity is quickly becoming a part of everyday life.

It's no wonder, then, that interactivity is making its way onto the Web. Interactivity is one of the reasons behind the explosive increase in the number of Internet users. The Internet existed decades before World Wide Web technology was invented a few short years ago, but it wasn't interactive. It was a text-only format and you had to know a lot about computers and computer terminology to use it to its full advantage.

Graphics came to the Web with browsers such as Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and other software technology that made it possible to see images on the screen in addition to text. Once that happened, it was only a matter of time before Web pages could literally sing to you and images could dance across your screen.

Even though these browsers made it a lot easier to get more out of the Web, the images presented on Web sites were still static. About a year ago, GIF animation changed all that. It was suddenly possible to make objects on a page jiggle, move, and dance.

Now just about every jazzy Web site you visit has something pulsating on screen. As annoying as that might be when you're trying to read the page, GIF animation also whet the appetite of many a webmaster. They wanted more and better animation and interactivity and they began looking for tools to help them satisfy these lively desires.

Enter tools like Macromedia's Shockwave and Sun Microsystem's Java. They made it possible for webmasters to put multimedia and interactive elements in their Web sites. While many Web sites are still in the static stage, more and more interactive sites are popping up. Soon interactive Web sites will be the norm.

There's another aspect related to interactivity of Web technology which spurs the growth of Web users.That is the human aspect--Internet connected people making it possible for any number of people to access information while at home or at the office and to interact online by sending each other email and files.

World Wide Web technology made it easy for people to do all this without having to memorize long strings of computer commands. This made going online easier and more enticing because navigation systems could be graphically oriented rather than text-command oriented.

Adding it all up, interactivity made the Internet a much more user-friendly environment. And that got a lot of people thinking, writing, emailing, and surfing. It also got a lot of people thinking about how they could use interactivity on their company intranets.

At the risk of being hopelessly superficial, let's define an intranet as a closed-circuit Internet. Unlike the Internet, which is open to anyone with a computer and a modem, intranets are restricted. To gain entrance, you have to access the local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN) the intranet is running on. Even if access to the intranet is possible through the Internet, a password is usually required to gain access.

Most intranets have been created by businesses to serve as repositories for vast amounts of proprietary information about a particular company. For example, Sir Speedy's intranet, dubbed Sir Speedy Net, is a collection of digital files and corporate information that more than 600 franchises tap into on a regular basis. Not only is there information about equipment at various locations, franchise owners can also download a file containing the monthly newsletter or files that can be used to print marketing materials.

Most intranets are more conservative than Web sites in design, because most are constructed for purely business-related reasons. However, they don't have to be dull or static. Interactivity can make intranets better communication tools, also.

So much for the history lesson. Everybody knows what the Web is like today. What has that got to do with you and your business? A great deal, it turns out, if your company needs to persuade, inform, or communicate with anyone else on this planet.

You can add interactivity to your intranet and Web presentations using various Web tools such as Shockwave and Kodak's Photo CD. You can also use the same technology for short, stand-alone presentations for one-on-one or small-group meetings by opening the file on your computer using your favorite browser.

There are many different software tools to help you create interactive elements. Here are the names of a few such products.

Macromedia's product roster of interactive software tools includes Shockwave, Director, Freehand, and xRes. Shockwave is the technology Macromedia created for viewing multimedia on the Web. Browsers that have the Shockwave plug-in installed can display Shockwave movies right on the Web or Intranet page.

Use Director for creating multimedia movies and Freehand for creating print, Web, and intranet static images. Use xRes to prepare images and Shockwave files for use on your Web or intranet site.

If you buy the Freehand 7 Graphics Studio, you get almost everything you need to create interactive elements, including animated GIFs. The Studio is a software suite comprising Freehand, Shockwave, Fontographer (a font creation and editing tool), Extreme 3D (a 3D authoring tool), and xRes.

If all you need is a tool that can animate GIFs, you can use the GIF Construction Set by Alchemy Mindworks (http://www.mindwork.shop.com/ alchemy/alchemy.html). With this program, you can combine several GIF images into a multiple image (animated) GIF file. You can also create animated GIFs in Photoshop.

If you're looking to create multimedia presentations with a twist, turn to Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Tools suite (http://www.apple.com). With this software, you can create virtual reality movies with 360-degree perspective.

Interactivity won't transform a bad Web or intranet site into an award-winning one, but it will make some elements of any site more effective. If you want to catch the attention of a fast-moving Web surfer, adding a snazzy interactive game to your Web page should slow him or her down long enough to glance at the page. The best interactive game won't keep anyone's attention for long, if the site doesn't contain useful content, however. It also won't make a surfer stay long enough to find what he or she is looking for if the site is poorly designed.