The internet is big and frightening.
It wasn't always that way. The internet used to be small and friendly. It was populated by nerds with unkemp beards and UNIX mainframes, Usenet was useful for things other than files, txt spk (lol) was still a thing of the future and Kirk vs. Picard websites made up over half the pages on the net. To prove exactly how small things used to be here is the first ever map of the internet:
It shows the first node on the ARPANET at the University California Los Angeles (UCLA) on the 2nd September 1969. I'm somewhat surprised they needed to draw a map to navigate the internet in 1969. Even I don't need a map to get from A to B when A and B are the only places in existance. It's lucky they got some mapping practice in though because the internet of today is a much more confusing beastie:
clicky for big, (c) The Lumeta corporation
I don't have a clue what is going on in either map, but looking beyond surface appearances, I think we all know that on a fundamental level the maps reduce down to this:
Not only has the internet grown in size, but it has also grown in scope. There is now a website available for fans of every single possible fetish. Even ones that haven't been invented yet, as far as I can tell.
Gone are the days when you "surfed" the "information superhighway" and "clicked" "hyperlinks", there is now a new* buzzword in town: Web 2.0.
It's a hard term to define (there is an entire essay on it here), but you'll kind of get the idea by looking at this comparison of some typical "Web" applications with Web 2.0 ideas that accomplish the same thing.
The ideas of community interaction, the perpetual beta, participation not publishing, decentralization, and trust between the users and administrators are pretty central to Web 2.0, and are really personified (applicationified? typified? webified? curse my crappy vocabulary) by Wikipedia and YouTube, and of course my own patron, www.blogger.com.
Now it's worth noting that there is big money in creating new web applications (grouper.com, a tiny video sharing site was recently sold for 60 million dollars. People have put the value of youtube at a billion dollars), with that in mind I decided to try and get rich with some awesome web 2.0 ideas:
eBay with prostitutes. Possibly some sort of community rating system.
Google are most of the way to realizing this idea with Google answers. Say you want to remove a friend, business associate or celebrity from the gene pool, you click the relevant buttions on gAssassin.com and are immediately paired up with some unemployed sociopath who will off your victim at a low low price.
It's a win-win(-lose) situation!
There already exists a thing called HotMaps, which ties together Google maps with HotOrNot data to allow you to scour your local area for both beautiful and ugly people.
I'd like to see this taken one step further with eStalker. Hotmaps combined with mySpace, livejournal, blogger, eBay, Amazon, and basically any other online database you can think of.
The primary audience for this site would be lonely/obsessed males, who would likely pay upwards of a hundred quid a pop to find out everything about theirnext victim friend
Despite the obvious (and serious) legal and ethical implications these are just the sort of applications that will drive web 2.0 straight through web 3.1, web 95 and into the sort of Gibsonesque cyberspace I think we all know the internet should be.
Well, I'm all tapped out of ideas now, but everybody else should try it. Just think "outside the box". Probably slightly less outside the box than my morally questionable ideas, but hey! be creative.
*I am not good with technology so "is" means "about a year ago"
It wasn't always that way. The internet used to be small and friendly. It was populated by nerds with unkemp beards and UNIX mainframes, Usenet was useful for things other than files, txt spk (lol) was still a thing of the future and Kirk vs. Picard websites made up over half the pages on the net. To prove exactly how small things used to be here is the first ever map of the internet:
It shows the first node on the ARPANET at the University California Los Angeles (UCLA) on the 2nd September 1969. I'm somewhat surprised they needed to draw a map to navigate the internet in 1969. Even I don't need a map to get from A to B when A and B are the only places in existance. It's lucky they got some mapping practice in though because the internet of today is a much more confusing beastie:
clicky for big, (c) The Lumeta corporation
I don't have a clue what is going on in either map, but looking beyond surface appearances, I think we all know that on a fundamental level the maps reduce down to this:
Not only has the internet grown in size, but it has also grown in scope. There is now a website available for fans of every single possible fetish. Even ones that haven't been invented yet, as far as I can tell.
Gone are the days when you "surfed" the "information superhighway" and "clicked" "hyperlinks", there is now a new* buzzword in town: Web 2.0.
It's a hard term to define (there is an entire essay on it here), but you'll kind of get the idea by looking at this comparison of some typical "Web" applications with Web 2.0 ideas that accomplish the same thing.
The ideas of community interaction, the perpetual beta, participation not publishing, decentralization, and trust between the users and administrators are pretty central to Web 2.0, and are really personified (applicationified? typified? webified? curse my crappy vocabulary) by Wikipedia and YouTube, and of course my own patron, www.blogger.com.
Now it's worth noting that there is big money in creating new web applications (grouper.com, a tiny video sharing site was recently sold for 60 million dollars. People have put the value of youtube at a billion dollars), with that in mind I decided to try and get rich with some awesome web 2.0 ideas:
pBay
eBay with prostitutes. Possibly some sort of community rating system.
gAssassin
Google are most of the way to realizing this idea with Google answers. Say you want to remove a friend, business associate or celebrity from the gene pool, you click the relevant buttions on gAssassin.com and are immediately paired up with some unemployed sociopath who will off your victim at a low low price.
It's a win-win(-lose) situation!
eStalker
There already exists a thing called HotMaps, which ties together Google maps with HotOrNot data to allow you to scour your local area for both beautiful and ugly people.
I'd like to see this taken one step further with eStalker. Hotmaps combined with mySpace, livejournal, blogger, eBay, Amazon, and basically any other online database you can think of.
The primary audience for this site would be lonely/obsessed males, who would likely pay upwards of a hundred quid a pop to find out everything about their
Despite the obvious (and serious) legal and ethical implications these are just the sort of applications that will drive web 2.0 straight through web 3.1, web 95 and into the sort of Gibsonesque cyberspace I think we all know the internet should be.
Well, I'm all tapped out of ideas now, but everybody else should try it. Just think "outside the box". Probably slightly less outside the box than my morally questionable ideas, but hey! be creative.
*I am not good with technology so "is" means "about a year ago"
