Talking to a brick wall...

Rants & Raves

Rants & Raves

Finding the Web

The Future of the Web

I think, these days, the web will never be what it was… at least never entirely. It probably never entirely was what I just described it as, just as it now is not ONLY a set of linked pages which can also be searched… it is much, much more, so many different things to so many people.
    And yet the primary ways through which we experience it play perhaps the largest role in defining, for each of us, what the web is. And so, to that end, I write this in hopes that I might show my view (the right one, of course ^_^) to a few others and spread the idea as far as I can.

A few places, like A List Apart, k10k, Praystation, (one); Seanbaby, The Onion, (another); Sinfest, Sluggy, Bruno and the like, (yet one more); and even in a way, my own site, Kenny's and our other friends' sites (to at least some extent); form communities, which are held together by links. They link each other, talk about each other, talk about other communities and link to them… The more professional of these sites I have listed even seem to make it a point to link to other sites that they've found in their random travels…
    They, in a way, revive the art of browsing. They are true to the original creation of the web. True to some, unnamable things that the web was then and in at least some ways is not now. And I applaud them for it.


    The web is nothing, really, but a huge collection or web of individual pages. Pages belonging to individuals like you, me, our friends, our companies… And here, I call on you to make your individual difference. If you have any idea what it is that I am talking about, if you agree with me at all, then perhaps you should in your own way contribute to this idea that I'm speaking of… an idea that (I think) is faint and fading in today's Internet. An Internet increasingly made of useless, cluttering, unfindable pages and large, business driven corporate sites… these aren't bad, but all too often they exist with no relation to anything else around.
    The web is a community, and what is a community but a set of relationships? When these relationships are lost, what we're left with may be a community of sorts, but I think not one worth living in. As far as I can see, we are going to be living with, if not in, the Web for a long time now… and so I want to make it as nice a community as I can, don't you?

  1. Brave New Web
  2. The World at your fingertips
  3. Through the eye of a needle
  4. New ways to search
  5. Just a Community

 

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Think & Chew

Naturally, this would be incomplete without a link to AltaVista. Though much changed, it is still just about the best search engine out there, and it's not its fault I'm a weirdo ^_^

The newcomer, of course, also deserves a link. Google is now in many ways what I find the ideal search engine to be.

One of those professional sites that makes it a point to mention their wanderings? Try Kaliber 10000.

And, the home community is probably the most important. Probably the center of the community I claim to be a part of, Civilized Pigdom has played as much a part in the ideas here as any of the other sites I mentioned above, which is saying a good bit.

What is community but communication? If you want to be a part of this community, go rant a bit on your own at The Forum! >>

(AltaVista and the AltaVista Logo are are trademarks of AltaVista Company.)

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