> *snort* what elitist... why I outta... Look, ugly web pags and blog are
> EXACTLY the dream of the internet empowering people to publish and
> communicate on their own. It just turns out that most people have horrible
> taste in colors, like things that go "beep beep", and having nothing to say
> that is of interest to anyone outside their closest circle.
Jan Coffey replied:
In 1997 if you were to use web-crawler to find some bit of information you
desired it would take only a few minutes and the search results would be very
benificial.
In 1999 Altavista would give you slightly more "noise" but still first page results were usefull.
In 2001 Google was decent, but the results you desired were on the second or
third page.
Now in 2003 You may not get any results which are benificial from any result
on any search site. The vast majority of web "destinations" are garbage.
There is so much noise now that real information might as well not be there.
At one point you could find into faster on the web. Now it is faster to look
in an encyclopida or in the lybrary. The internet as an information resource
is all but dead.
So? The internet can be useful as a research tool but was not designed to be one. Well, ok, originally back in the days of DARPA... At any rate, the internet of today and even the internet of 1997 was not meant to be a place to go for all of your information needs. It's a place where you can put up anydamnthing you want. It's free speech at the most extreme. There has always been as much misinformation and disinformation on the web (and on gopher and on UseNet, etc.) as there is good information.
If you want good info, a library is still your best option, and probably was even in 1997. If you want to see individuals empowered to say anydamnthing they want about anydamnsubject they want to anydamnperson they want, then the internet is the place for you.
Suggesting that only certain people should be able to post to the internet means that you want to appoint an information gatekeeper, a censor who gets to decide what can be said and what can't. *That* would kill the internet, and most definitely smacks of elitism as Jeffrey wrote.
If I have a choice between a nice, safe, accurate, but censored internet, and a chaotic, sometimes accurate sometimes not, uncensored internet, I'll take the chaos any day. The classic Cyberpunk Manifesto (think Gareth Branwen rather than Christian Kirtchev) says that all information wants to be free. Ideally that doesn't mean "free of charge" but "freely (easily) accessible."
And the internet is not like an encyclopedia or a library, where order is imposed on the information by alphabetizing it or categorizing it (whether under the Dewey system or the LC system). On the internet, information clusters together based on the interests of the people who put that information up. In other words, if a lot of people have common interests, they'll probably link to each other's sites. There will be tight groupings where most everyone links to most everyone else's sites (frex, most Buffy sites have links to most other Buffy sites). But some of those sites also have links to other things, some fairly closely related and some quite distantly. So sites within an interest cluster will have many links to each other, but a few links to other clusters as well. Given the complexity of that kind of network, it should be much harder than it really is to find info on the web. The ideal way to find info on the web, certainly the most fun and educational way, is to get into a cluster that is about the topic in which you're interested, and then start following links. It may not be fast, but I don't like living in a sound-byte culture anyway. I'd much rather take the time to really understand a topic (or at least what people who post to the web think about a topic) than to find snippets of info from the top 2 or 3 rated sites and miss all the wonderful context and complexity.
In other words, yeah, it can be hard to find useful info on the web sometimes. So what?
Reggie Bautista Chaos Can Be Good Maru
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