The way the web should be.
It's not only a case of making a personal contribution, however small. It's also (dare I say it?) a way of taking a stand. A recent study by Jupiter Media Metrix concluded that four web sites control 50% of the time that internet users spend online. Needless to say, I'm not one of those four, which are (were): America Online, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Napster. (I'm not sure just what Napster is doing there. People use [or used] it, but I don't know why they would have visited its web site very often. Maybe they know/knew something I don't.) Scott Rosenberg, writing in Salon magazine asks some good questions about the validity of this study. But he still sees it as a trend, and a frightening one at that. If once, long ago, surfing the web was an experience that promised surprise and serendipity, a meeting with the unexpected, today the associative web has been replaced by the association web, a button-down experience in which our information has been prepared for us by the same companies that prepare our information in the newspapers and on television. The corporate content providers have no need for personal and associative hypertext, and the newbies hardly know that such a thing exists. Even if the Boidem has become an anachronism, something I publicly worried about more than a year ago it still represents the web of which I want to be a part.
Go to: Something for Nothing.