Slashdot Mirror
The Nine Continents of the Internet
Here's a Valentine's Day gift to you all (smooch!), my shortest column ever: As the Internet enters its second era, it appears to be evolving into a series of distinctly separate, different continents and sub-continents. (Continued below)
Here are my names for the nine continents of the Internet Planet. They speak for themselves:
- The Corporate Internet (the dot.coms, portals, big ISPs, e-traders)
- The Undernet (subterranean but thriving mailing lists, Usenet groups, messaging systems, Weblogs)
- TechNet (geeks, nerds, scientists and researchers, sites like this one, c.net
- X-Net (sex and dark and forbidden pleasures)
- InfoNet (news and information)
- BuyNet (auctions, products, retailing services)
- CultureNet (salon.com, movies, TV, pop culture, MP3s, DVDs)
- GameNet (the rich, complex and rapidly growing world of gaming)
- GodNet (the much overlooked but vast hive of spiritual and religous sites and lists)
Discuss among yourselves:
The millions of mindless "me-too" personal homepages that offer no useful content to the world.
Check out the 31337 trolls on 31337troll
and when you're done there, check out the non-31337 (8u7 57i11 3n73r7a1n1ng) trolls at trolltalk
There's been a strong trend (as Jon points out) towards building Internet communities -- groups of people sharing a common goal or interest working and hanging out together on-line. What effect (if any) do you think this has on old fashioned, face-to-face, hangin' out at the Elks Lodge communities? Are the virtual communities keeping people from entering into community with thier off-line neighbors?
Perhaps (don't know, just suggesting) those most heavliy connected to online communities might not be the type to engage in their off-line communities anyways, so there's little net effect.
In addition to working with several online communities, I've been surprised to find how many of the same interests I share with my off-line friend and neighbors.
Happy Singles Awareness Day everybody!
Don't forget about the cowdance.come type sites.
Man, she was even hotter in "The Professional".
FISH net, for all the aquarium enthusiasts.
Face it, unless you were programming IMPs, you probably missed an era or two. Duh!
RPoetNet: Sites with hackneyed, unoriginal comments
hhmmm..
This is probably as close as it can get until the 3rd era comes along, then eventually the Corporate Internet buys the GameNet and CultureNet to expand buisness and appeal more to the "X generation" which in turns ruins those 2 planets. Then GodNet, in an effort to appeal to the same generation, merges with X-Net to try to make things more interesting. TechNet merges with the Undernet just so it can stay alive against the enormous corporations, which in turn buys BuyNet and InfoNet because they showed signs of growing. This causes a war between the newly formed TechUnderNet and the corporations, which eventually ends with the corporate net winning and buying the TechUnderNet.
So whats left in the 3rd era you ask? Religious porn and Microsoft.
Three Chers??? There is only one and shes ancient and rancid. Jon doesnt deserve all that.. :)
Maybe it's because there are so few libertarians in the real world they have to take to the net to find anyone who thinks likewise. You would think that, this being America and them being libertarians all those libertarians would have gravitated towards the community that provided them with the most liberty and they wouldn't need to get on the net to evangelize. Hell, even the Amish figured this one out and they aren't nearly as smart as most libertarians claim to be. Or perhaps libertarians tacitly recognize that trading security for liberty is always a good deal?
amen to that my fellow geek brother.
She WAS hotter in "The Professional". Also note that "The Professional" was released under that title in North America; in Europe it was released as "Leon". The difference between the two is that the scenes where Matilda (Natalie's character) quite frankly asked Leon to have sex with her were cut out of "The Professional" version. (Note to scandalized prudes: he said no.) American society is too prudish to deal with the idea of a girl wanting sex, but being trained how to kill is apparently okay.
Get the "Leon" version if you can... makes me understand the obession with a naked Natalie. I don't get the petrified part though...
One net aspect was missing: katz.net, katz.org, ztak.in-addr.arpa, etc... katz.net-starkly commercial, shameless self promotion. A culture of one, devoted to one, for the benefit of one. I think that's all. _-----------------------------------------_ Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread
The People for the Privitization of Sidewalks, would please ask NOT to be refered to as zealot's maybe enthusiast...
People for the Privitization of Sidewalks (PooPS) is a nonprofit orgaztion fighting for the freedom do as you please on your privitly owned sidewalk...
Wrong. Nothing is inherently divided into categories - that is what your mind does. Categorization is a worldview, used by people who need to simplify the chaotic nature of life into bitesized "reality" bits. Then one can use these bits to delude themself that they see some kind of greater truth. Sorta like Jon Katz does . . .
Most people on the planet ARE of the 13-18 year old mental age. Where have YOU been?
There are a couple of ways to chop the internet up actually.
Firstly, there's the "Good 'Ole US" system:
USA.Net
EveryoneElse.Net
Then there's the "AOL is the Leader" system:
Ads.Net
Buy.Net
News.Net
Ads.Net
Buy.Net
Entertainment.Net
Ads.Net
Buy.Net
Talk.Net
Ads.Net
Buy.Net
Alternatively, there's the "What do you use it for?" system:
Pr0n.Net
Warez.Net
MP3.Net
Ads.Net
Buy.Net
Talk.Net
TackyHomepage.Net
And, not forgetting, the "Ahh Believe!" system:
IBelieve.Net
TheyDoNot.Net
Then there's the "Commerical" system:
OurCompany.Net
MarketingOpportunity.Net
And also the "Linux zealot" system:
FreeStuff.Net
NotFreeStuffToBeExterminated.Net
As well as the "Let's be serious" system:
EnablingFreeCommunication.Net
NewSocietalParadigm.Net
UnwashedMasses.Net
And finally, there's the "My View" system:
StuffILike.Net
AllThatOtherCrap.Net
Wingnut
My time is now worth $20 an hour. If I add up the
time I'd be likely to spend finding and
downloading something that works and that I
wanted enough to consider paying cash for, I
don't even bother with warez sitez for anything
under $200.
Are ther any sites that do not use this policy perhaps use straight forward systems of just links to apps? no porn?
Another question isn't it legal as long as you delete the offending material within 24hrs? That's the policy with roms at various emu sites.
Half a page of nothing is better than three scrolling pages of nothing, but not by much.
double post not meant
AdminNet is stuff like Internic, the root-servers, domain registries, etc.
john katz has WITHOUT CONSENT committed a SIMULATED SEXUAL ACT, namely KISSING all slashdot readers. he is worse than hitler
Need websites to surf for brainless content while staying up all night to avoid the clown. Slashdot, is a good site for that, it's hardly TechNet. It's becoming really worthless, and I don't mean the trolls and script kiddies. I mean crap like this from Katz.
IRC. Efnet. #warez
... so I don't need the internet
wow, you must really suck at getting warez. I can go find just about anything I want by asking a few efnetters and have it in a few minutes...
Natalie-Portman.net!
Out ... 6. You.
If you really want free software, use Free Software.
Another question isn't it legal as long as you delete the offending material within 24hrs? That's the policy with roms at various emu sites.
Actually that's a lie. There is not a law in the world that will allow you to use illegal ROM's for a 24 hour trial period.
But the more you repeat a lie, people start to believe it
Yeah but anytime i try to get into #warez on efnet its accessible by invite only. That sucks
Yeah right, Salon is culture, if it is in a petri dish!
I can summon some asian legbreaker dudes to fix 'im up in real life too :)
The hate net is a part of all the nets mentioned in the article. But they are also a seperatist movement within each continent. Trying to become their own little section (for the slow people).
And perhaps a Gov.net to watch the crime.net.
Have you seen her lately?
She's not 13 anymore!
Shouldn't The corperate (sp?) networks be CorpNet,NerdNet, etc? -ColdStone
actually al gore did not invent the internet. it was what was commonly referred to as a "gaffe", or a humorous and embarassing mistake, that gore took claim for inventing the internet on cnn. the real father of the internet was probably vinton cerf. i am not a big detractor of al gore's, but in this case i think that the truth should be told, and he overexaggerated his role in the beginning of the internet. there are many reasons to like gore but making the internet is not one of them.
The article title seemed to suggest that someone had mapped the topography of the Internet in some new way. I read it and as many posters commented it's some made up arbitary divisions. Now if it was something like:h tml
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/ches/map/index.
I'd be a bit more impressed. Go get your own maps of the Internet! They make nice background wallpaper if you rotate the colors somewhat. There's also links to other mapping projects on the page.
Me, duh.
- FSCK Fitzgerald
(this article)
What the hell is the point of this? So we now know the 9 continents. I think the physical ones are a bit more useful. No, wait,they arent. The only reason why we must make force our children to memorize our 7 contenents is to pass rediculous geography bees. When did you last use the obvious knowledge that the earth has 7 contenents? Thanks Katz, for producing another rediculously useless article. -Fred FredBenenson.com
it isn't just on the internet you know - it is everywhere now. just the other day i saw a sale on hate spreaders at the local hardware store. this sort of thing REALLY turns my stomach. i agree that speech is too free on the net. we should do something about this - i'm going to send an email to my senator! i've had enough of this free speech thing. remember, the US constitution is a living, breathing document - it can be changed.
How about CrapNet?
That should account for about 99% of the web sites out there... /. excluded of course. ;-)
MAKE MONEY FAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaassszzzzzzzzzzzz
The web is a sea of bullshit with only about 6 or7 good sites left....I CAN"T BELIVE THE PORN MONGERS GOT AHOLD OF POOP.COM...pisses me off where else can you buy petrafied dino crap
god damnit. why did i have to go and waste all my moderation points :P this parent definitely deserved one of mine
I respect Jon Katz. I enjoy all of his articles, despite their occasional repetitiveness or grammar/spelling errors. He brings up good topics to discuss and has a lot of insight into the world. Jon, if you read this don't let the trolls fuck with your head.
The original poster stated two categories: "Single Artist" and "Multiple Artist" [sic]. The latter category refers not to the number of performers in a group, but the number of distinct groups on the recording (i.e. a compliation or anthology CD with more than one group/artist featured would be "Multiple Artist").
Don't forget Hype-net, the growing legion of ignorant journalists who feel the need to impose their narrow-minded, misleading, distorted view of the internet. It's always 2 things: 1) I just have a deadline to meet and filling space It's like seeing a light bulb above the head of a chimpanzee...
I believe that one very important, albeit inaccessable, part of the Internet has been left out. The large amounts of military (or, to put it more broadly, government) traffic that passes over the Internet. All unclassified network traffic is connected to the Internet, from the individual desktops in CONUS offices to the network connections on battleships and deployed units in the middle of the jungle.
open source is legalized warez....that way..you wont have to steal anything...its just givin to you(lazy ass)
This article is yet another example of Katz's thinly-veiled attacks on religion in general and Christianity in particular. Katz's spiteful writings serve no purpose other than to stir up hatred and animosity towards people of faith. Katz, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why don't you move to Eastern Europe or some place where this type of attitude is accepted more.
this is the first time ive seen a non negative non contradictory highly moderated post to Katz!! lol I sort highest first! ;p
You can't walk from N. America to S. America without getting wet. We can thank the Panama Canal for that.
=)
In this day an age, age itself has little to do with ones knowlege, maturity, or integrity.
A sixteen year old could utterly whoop up a veteran code hacker, or vice-versa, all I'm saying is don't judge by age, (judge by code)
,freeze
Woah! Bull! The entire warez scene is not about making money. Yes, there are "factions" within the scene that want to make money of it, but the rest just get the software because they want it. Is it wrong, yes. Is it all about profit, no way!
Just a quote from your favourite book (1984): "With the developement of /television/ and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police, and in the sound of official propoganda, with all other channels of communication closed." Is this the future of the internet ? (depressing book that)
Thus the /.post was correct, and the BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE swings evenly again.
Next!
No... #4 should be Shiri Appleby, and Natalie Portman can be #5. Sorry, I just don't go for crappy articles, and Shiri is way better than Nat
Hmm.
Nice spelling. I can really understand you.
Are you Canadian?
This reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Remember L-space in the Unseen University's library? Would be amusing to name your idea after this...
Only complete fools actually look for warez on anything begining with http:// or public ftp:// for that matter.
;)
It is ALL popups, pr0n, topsites (VOTE FOR ME) etc etc etc
All the actual links are to people's private warez collections, and they come down fast, when said person realizes some lame script kiddie who can do java and cgi webpage loops/voting has linked to their files.
If you want REAL warez, you need to find the right place on IRC. Usenet is okay, but the limits most newservs have on filesizes has killed it as a source over time as everything got bigger. Who wants to get the latest iso in 589 files? 20-60 rars is bad enough as it is.
Most (90%) channels are crap, "traders", beggers, ratio fuckers (most of who don't honor after you upload BTW) all-advantage-esque ftp password fags and l33t h4x0rs who think a winzip keygen and some windoze serial numbers is a good collection. They have no human ops, or real lazy ones...people repeat messages every 5 seconds and the titles changes every minute. On the channels I know, you'd get banned for 5 million years for repating the same crap 3 times in 10 seconds.
The GOOD channels have good ops, and kick any dumbfuck who begs, promised 'rewards' or sets up bullshit ftps. Being a warez addict doesn't mean you're a complete anarchist...channels need order or no one gets the goods. Don't bother *at all* if you're on a modem, the good fservs always have bandwidth minimums (10kbps being the norm) that keep analog and isdn wannabes from clogging up the channel.
Fserv/DCC away, on the right channel you can get 0-day ISOs. If only they would unrar the damn things, I'm kinda tired of getting ~40 x 15mb packets of cds. That and the queues can get long, but anyone with a decent connection can select and forget. Be sure to set incoming files to autoaccept, or they will time out while you sleep. They're getting the idea now though, you see more and more all iso and bin + cue serving.
Relic is a good place, EFnet is *NOT*, and any bigname ISP IRC server is shit, they go after the good channels.
Last night alone I grabbed 3 complete images, and many parts of other images I was finishing up. I used to be picky about my cd-r media, but now I could give a shit less if its repackaged no-name in a 100 spindle without jewel cases. Oops, bad cd? Pop out another one. I bought a 8x burner soon affter getting a decent connection and becoming an IRC junkie.
Use mIRC
www.mirc.co.uk
Pretty funny that it has had over 6 billion unique log-ons, and they finally got their 12th person to register the program a few weeks back
Mu.
Dudes are flaky becuase their necks are on the line... youd be flaky to if youve heard and seen shit that seems like it popped out of a movie... yes it happens like that but not as much as people think... that is unless you live in japan and are a introverted hacker whom is involved in mobs and mob killings.. that is when the shit gets really fucked up but hey.. you dont haveto take my word for it.. just takea trip to japan`s underworld and see it for yourself myfriends, and may you all be exposed to the true lite of what is coming and the inevitable of the computer scene Here comes johny pnumatic... (heh cant spell)
You know, the 'CLEAN YOUR GODDAMN ROOM...HOW COULD YOU FIND ANYTHING IN THIS MESS?!' type of organization...
:)
Psuedo random stacks of cds...I bet I can find any one of my cds 3 times faster than the anal Type As who alphabetize their fircking cds do.
Its really is security through obscurity...for example, if I had a pgp-keydisc, and the Suits only had 60 seconds left to search my room before I got home, which setup would you have? A-Z, or 50 or so stacks of 3-6 cds each lying on tables, floors, bookshelves etc, also in other rooms in the house...?
or else they are all a bunch of 8 year old crack heads.
There are two kinds of people -- those that divide people into two categories and those that don't. Bite~Me
Not to mention those who would use a "word" like "peep" to mean "people".
god bill, do you have to fucking GLOAT? just because you happen to be the richest bastard on this planet even though you produce an overrated, overhyped, overpriced OS that happens to dominate the industry due mostly to your luck and clever marketing skills. go back to fixing those 65,000 bugs left in Win2k or cloning yourself or whatever it is you do in your free time.
one of the continental shelves is pushed under, one of them springs up into a huge landmass. look at what india has done to asia. Open Source is doing that to the rest of the internet, and the rest of the outside world. Open Srouce will rule the world.
Oh man! I have been going through these posts and I have to say, this is the first, truly inspired, and witty post yet. Thank you!
What about icq aol instant messenger and irc?? they are in themselves communities
sometimes you have to make money doing what you enjoy to keep doing what you enjoy. slashdot is succesful. slashdot makes money. the people who make slashdot make money doing what they love. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH TRYING TO MAKE MONEY. as long as you aren't a greedy bastard and you share the wealth. slashdot does need to share more of the wealth.
subgenius.com - silly monkeys, check subgenisu.org instead for the REAL Bob poo!
A better concept is to talk about self-ordering systems and on what scale.
AOL
Just to make sure we are clear, the number 9 might be valid here, but not in real life. Are we clear on that? There are only five: Asia Autralia: Autralia, Indonesia, ... Europe Africa America: North, Central, South + Caribean (as in anything that is not on the others..as in every piece of land that was unknown before.) I think that some people say there are like 11, or something like that which is increadible stupid. I hear lately so many anouncements making the US=America. To those people who are confused...just open a World Atlas!
Asia ...
Autralia: Autralia, Indonesia,
Europe
Africa
America: North, Central, South + Caribean (as in anything that is not on the others..as in every piece of land that was unknown before.)
I think that some people say there are like 11, or something like that which is increadible stupid. I hear lately so many anouncements making the US=America. To those people who are confused...just open a World Atlas!
hmm, with that listing, wouldn't one be able to call this net, BigBrotherNet, For a long time (and probably still now) Internic controlled the net an extent, and the "etc..." implies similiar organizations, should we opt for a more appropriate rename of this? However, AdminNet itself isn't to bad, i still like mine better ;>
This metaphor is inflexible. The entire point of the Internet is not the segregation of networks, via some sort of continental drift, but the integration of them, bringing together many protocols and communities under a shared protocol.
/use/ the networks to meet their needs, and sort accordingly, almost a Maslow's hierarchy of Internet needs. These sites are shelter, these sites give me power, these sites give me knowledge, these sites give me social relationships. The future of the network is probably not in Web content, HTML formatted with links. The "continents" are a bubble in time. And most network users "live" in the ocean, in the space between the "continents," and almost as many of them work there.
These "Continents" often end up linking to one another - porn and dotcom, say, infonet and corporate. Undernet and porn. The possibility and peril of the online world is that these things can now get in the ring together, that there is no longer any "sacred space." The Undernet meets the Corporate Net through Third Voice and similar products. The old cultural boundaries between content and individuals are blurred.
A more useful Network ontology would be to examine how individuals
Argh.
Magazines are even more segmented, maybe just because they've been around longer. Ditto for books, movies, any other media.
Last week, the Commerce Internet came under attack. The US government will now use this as a reason to crack down on the Underground Internet. That's why these categories are important: because people who make political decisions have experience with only a few segments of the Internet smorgasbord.
There definitely needs to be a 10th continent.. say continent X.. This is where all of the hackers, crackers, script kiddies, warez people, virii writers belong. Linus Torvalds fits here perfectly (although yes he is quite a geek). Think of Continent X as Australia. Long ago this was a place where countries dumped their prisoners. Now look how Australia has flourished. (hint: Linux becoming an O/S with real potential rather than a renegade O/S)
Hell what about MP3-ers? Every type of person there is is into mp3s...
That's my $.02.
I hate to burst your collective bubbles, but closed source is not "out," nor is it going out.
Just because some ignorant site like Slashdot gets a few hundred thousand visitors who mostly believe that "Windows has lost" (which, btw, it hasn't - and also, the number of the people that believe this is probably just a really vocal four digit amount) doesn't mean the 259 million users online agree.
And need I go into how Microsoft's former CEO has 90 billion dollars, and you don't?
Keep in mind that he got that rather quickly. Linux has had its chance. It still has one. Kind of. It's a great idea, but here's what corporations have over open source freelancers:
Knowledge of how the world works.
Code hackers like those who build Linux believe that Linux is, without a doubt in the world, absolutely perfect. This causes many problems. For one, your OS is going to suck with time. For two, you look like morons (and are?). For three, no OS is perfect. But every other comment on Slashdot is about how Windows sucks because they can't figure out how to configure it right and how a Windows system had some problem so it must b Windows' fault. Of course, when something running Linux crashes, it's most definitely just a Microsoft employee trying to figure out how to run Linux - because Linux can't crash! It's perfect!
Well, folks. Keep bitching about how Bill Gates sucks and how "M$" blows. But just remember: You're not the one with 90 billion dollars.
(BTW, I'm posting as an AC because, while this is offtopic, I know that it's a disagreement so it'll be moderated to "Troll." I also realize my post contained two sentences that could be considered unnecessarily offensive, however there's two things to note here:
1) I'd be marked down anyway
and
2) That doesn't seem to keep "Linux rocks" posts from getting a 5, "Interesting").
So we can say that the Inquisitors and Conquistadores weren't true Christians, and that the USSR and China weren't truly Communist. And where does that get us?
In both cases at least some of people that you mentioned adhered to their doctrines and therefore were true Christians or Communists. I won't comment on the first, however in the second case goals and means are turned upside down by anti-communist propaganda -- socialist states were the means, choosen by communists (to be exact, some of communists) to achieve their goal in the future, yet I have yet to find an American who is not convinced that USSR is a completed implementation of Communism doctrine.
Labels are slippery things. Though two things that can be inferred: states which call themselves Communist
No country ever called itself Communist -- communist doctrine doesn't even have a definition of "communist country". Those countries called themselves Socialist, and it is even prominently placed in most of their full names. Dominant (or the only) political party in those countries was Communist, yet country never was claimed to be an implementation of Communism.
are likely to be horrendously oppressive, and organised religion is a tempting justification for all manner of atrocity.
In my personal experience oppression in capitalist country (US) is at the same order of magnitude as in socialist one (USSR), just means and directions of oppression differ -- in socialist countries government is corrupt by its own means, and oppresses everyone, while in capitalist countries big business corrupts government and oppresses the population with the help of the corrupt government. I admit that countries in the state of political/economical disorder (current Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) are much worse than both systems in their stable state, however I hardly can see it as a valid excuse.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You can't exactly think that communists would want say their political beliefs being challenged would you? I can't say that you would. This is bad for keeping control.
All political movements are bad at handling open discussions of their doctrines -- one thing is preaching to the converted and booing at small number of opponents in presence of huge crowd of supporters, and another one is a discussion where both supporters and opponents have comparable opportunity to explain their views and challenge each other. Actually I have seen communists defending their views in open discussion with stronger arguments and in much more intelligent manner than libertarians ever did when placed in unfriendly environment.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
How is communism a better system? It doesn't solve the problem of allocation of scarce resources as well as a decentralised system would, and then there's the small matter of it breaking down if central control is subverted (which means that all attempts to realise it require totalitarian authority).
I have never said that communism is a better system (previous poster said it, not me), but communism's main idea is that resources don't have to be scarce -- by communists' theory improvements in technology and society can cause abundance of all kinds of resources, and only greed can prevent people from using such resources responsibly, thus causing artificial scarcity for much longer time than it would be "natural". Therefore they claim that before abundance will be actually achieved people should become "better", more responsible and cooperative and less driven by primitive search of wealth and power (then in the case of true abundance people would feel guilty or even can become too bored if they would become worse slackers than the level where society sustains the abundance).
Countries that west called "communist" never claimed to achieve "communism" -- they called themselves "socialist" countries, and centralized control of the economy was claimed to be necessary only in socialist but not communist society. Communist governments of socialist countries were supposed to achieve the goal of building and advancing society that consists of those more responsible/cooperative people until the advancement of society will produce both abundant resources and responsible enough population to handle the abundance in the way that will allow true "comminism" to be self-supporting.
If by "better" you mean nicer in an abstract, non-practical sense, that could be argued. But an even nicer system would be for everybody to have as much of everything they want. It looks quite peachy, unless you actually try to implement it.
I agree with that. One can doubt that their goal was practical or achievable, and one can certainly point out that the way, "socialism" was implemented created totalitarian and corrupt governments. However they definitely weren't the first political movement facing this problem. Christian religion also taught that only development of virtues (whatever "virtues" are) can improve the life of people, and the same Christian religion caused quite a lot of violations of personal freedom, produced corrupt hierarchy of organized religion that supported the worst governments of the world, etc. Dominant ideologies of "capitalism", while probably being the most stable currently, have shown that they are, too, capable of producing social structures and political mechanisms that defeat their original purpose, reduce personal freedom, give people disincentive for productive work, and I believe that libertarian ideas, if implemented, will not be immune to this disease either (IMHO they are actually more vulnerable -- libertarians, even more than communists, ignore the fact that society always has forces that destabilize it, and even though stability is desirable for most of society members, without a mechanism that supports such a stability it can be easily turned into something that has a stabilizing mechanism -- anything between feudalism, military rule and current form of capitalism, dominated by few players with blatantly anti-consumer policy).
Communism may be a disagreeable philosophy, and it produced a large amount of grief and suffering, however your criticism of it shows that you are attacking some imaginary view of "communism", established by anti-communist propaganda, not the real thing. Any intelligent supporter of communism would point it out, and it probably would be a tough argument for "rah-rah, communism is bad" crowd.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Two issues:
One, I think that perhaps a "Cause Zealot" continent is in order. Consider how the internet serves as a connecting point for scattered populations with similar ideas. I just saw a piece last night about how McCain is doing his recruiting for volunteers almost exclusively on the net and using the net to organize them. Of course, then there are the usual suspects as well: Linux zealots, Mac evangelists, Amiga people, God-Hates-Fags morons, People for the Privitization of Sidewalks, etc.
Second, I think the "Corporate" and "Buy" areas should be merged as concepts and then subdivided into two catagories: Brochure sites and Useful Sites (where you can buy stuff, get research, insurance quotes or whatever). After all, corporations are at their heart and soul all trying to sell you something.
As for the general nature of the article, it's good food for thought and I didn't have to take a bathroom break in the middle of reading it. Bravo, Jon.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
For the "corporate" sites, I'm thinking more along the lines of those fun brochure sites you get when you go to any major corporate site. Slashdot doesn't show off VA's product line or explain VA's corporate philosophy, and I have yet to see the VA "Vision Statement" on the /. front page.
Try this one out: FinanceNet. This continent would consist of the stock trading sites and message boards (etrade, fool.com, etc.) There might be less of these than others, but I'll bet they're some of the more popular destinations on the net (for some reason, I'm not supposed to surt /. from the office, but updating my stocks every 15 minutes is A-OK with management).
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
the vast array of homepages doing nothing but aggrandizing the owner, his hobbies his cat/dog/car etc ad nauseam
-- never underestimate someone who overestimates himself
Well, I know I'm curious. What are the 12 dimensions of Book Space? (I'm also a Terry Pratchett reader and would suggest using L-Space as the name.)
You can't have continents without oceans to separate them. What are the oceans in this analogy? Continents imply that there are sections of the net with inhabitants that may never visit another section in their lifetime. When any site is a mere click away from any other site, this won't happen. Now if all you're trying to say is that it's possible to categorize sites into categories, and that some categories have more representation thatn others, well, duh. Have a look at this nifty site some time.
My personal feeling on this is that there is a lot of overlap there. For example, between the Corporate Net and the Buyers net, between the TechNet, and the InfoNet.
Good break down, though. Diagramatically, I would see fuzzy boarders between some of these continents, and some being sub-continents of others (BuyNet being encapsulated withing the CorporateNet).
T.
I wonder if these would follow under the UnderNet section, maybe. Hmmm. Then again, maybe not.
Probably should be a little small continent somewhere out in the middle of the ocean...
Jon, continent number 10 has just been found, orbitted in the other direction, as if captured by... oh, er. Sorry. Hmmm.
T.
Yeah, you may as well try and categorise CDs!
... you'll note that every music shop in the world attempts to categorise CDs by genre, but nobody's every done a perfect job of it.
Come to think of it, Yahoo and dmoz both try and categorise websites, and they've got a lot more than nine root hierarchies...
--
Certainly! Feel free to.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I defined any "congregation" of a large number of points as a "City", and smaller clusters as "Towns" and "Villages".
After a while, I realised that books weren't always absolutely uniformly consistant, from beginning to end. That they actually moved through Book Space, rather than occupying a point.
Using the metaphore above, some books could be described as "local inhabitants" (if they stayed within the limits of their city, town or village), "traders" (if they moved from one populated area to another), and "explorers" (if they ventured into otherwise empty regions).
A book, then, could be described by the journey through Book Space, from start to finish. This would not be a single number, but rather two numbers and a path. This would make it very complicated to write on the covers of books. :) On the other hand, seeing that path through Book Space would tell you more about the contents than the existing number ever would.
How does this apply to the Internet? I'd like to expand my concept of Book Space to cover all the content of the Internet. Instead of these 9 or so "Continents", I'd like to suggest that any Internet site or file also exists as an inhabitant of Book Space (which I guess I'll need to rename). Each physical site, virtual site, collection of pages/files, individual file will all have an identifiable path through Book Space.
Does this help any? Well, yes it does. You can define "similar content" in terms of a point and a maximum radius, depending on how similar you want. Anything inside that hyper-sphere is "similar" within the parameters you've defined.
How else does it help? Well, if any "continent" really exists on the Internet, it'll show up in Book Space. You'll be able to "see" a very sharp, distinct border, for a start. In the same way that very few towns can be found off the coast of Australia, you'll see very little in the way of habitation beyond such borders, except where two continents merge.
This is VERY distinct from unexplored territory within a country, as I've envisaged it. Such territory would be encapsulated, the way the deserts are encapsulated by the population.
I also think it's a more useful image, as it implies commerce and traffic between the different settled regions, allowing for a free exchange of ideas and growth. (It also allows for wars and conflict, but you can't have everything.) The image of isolated continents makes any exchange implicitly difficult, as you're conveying the impression vast distances, over difficult terrain (such as an ocean). I'd rather have an Internet where there was greater co-operation, closeness and contact.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Don't forget the thriving BBS culture. Telnet BBS's are thriving these days on the net, you thought the internet snuffed us out! Ha... we're still here in full ANSI colour!
For more info, check here:
http://www.darktech.org- Xabbu
- Jimbob
So what happens when continents collide? I mean, what if CorpNet runs head on into TechNet? Do we get a whole bunch of mountains? Or are they molehills?
The fact is that this whole thing isn't Internet-specific. The same idea can be applied to any culture at any time. We may have a few new continents here and there (TechNet?), but you can always apply whatever vague analogy to culture and have it make sense. It's like a horoscope in that sense, and it's worth about the same, too.
Applying the concept of continents--highly separated, long held virtually unbridgable and highly distinct land forms(from a social perspective, which is what Mr. Katz is working towards)--seems almost foolhardy in today's age of blurred edges.
It is not difficult to imagine a rapidly growing "grass roots site", utilizing and propounding the usage of the latest technologies, arguing the sociopolitical gains of widespread distribution of stigma-free demand-met service. For a limited fee, legitimacy, superior service, or just plain recognition would be proferred upon the customer; the Decision Solution would be borne out tight integration between the objective fact, the groupthink bandwagon, and the means to complete the solving transaction. It'd be fun. It'd be sexy. It'd be commerce as God Himself must have intended it--it'd be huge.
And hungry...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Actually, this is (1) false, and (2) beside the point.
(1) Consider that India is considered a part of Asia, despite being on a different tectonic plate. Australia is not considered to be on the same contintent as India, despite the fact that they are on the same plate. Whether something is part of one continent or another has nothing at all whatsoever to do with plate tectonics.
(2) Consider that the world was divided into the continents we know today hundreds of years before we discovered plate tectonics. Even if it were true that we had coincidentally managed to divide the world into continents such that it satisfied your definition, your
So while Africa is attached to Asia, it is a separate continent.
By your definition, Africa isn't really attached to Asia. In order to walk from the African plate to the Eurasian plate, you'd need to walk across the Arabian plate, which lies between them (and should be a seperate continent by your definition). Although this plates do touch, under the Mediterranean.
When continents and tectonic plates agree, it's only by historical accident. In no way does plate tectonics play a role in the definition of what is or isn't a continent.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
This makes sense if you're trying to create a portal site for finding information. It makes no sense if you're trying to divide the net into continents. What made Europe and Asia seperate continents has nothing to do with seperation of land mass (which it isn't) but with the seperation of the people. Likewise with the other continents (the fact that a large expanse of ocean between them explains why the social seperation existed, but it's the societal seperation, not the physical seperation, that defines continents).
The most logical way to divide the Internet into continents would be to study which sites are visited by which people. I think you'll find if you do that the Internet does divide into continents nicely, and more or less along the lines that Katz suggests (although I think it's just a rough sketch, don't take it too seriosly).
Please note that the type of content a site has, or who owns it, etc, is irrelevant to this sort of classification. Neither TLDs nor content are at all meaningful in determining which continent any particular site falls on.
Also note that just like real life, continents do not prevent people from interactings with people from other continents, or being a part of communities on different ones. The fact that people can be a part of multiple communities, or that links can be made between different places, or that some sites are hard to classify into one of these categories, in no way invalidates or even detracts from this style of classification.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
How is communism a better system? It doesn't solve the problem of allocation of scarce resources as well as a decentralised system would, and then there's the small matter of it breaking down if central control is subverted (which means that all attempts to realise it require totalitarian authority).
If by "better" you mean nicer in an abstract, non-practical sense, that could be argued. But an even nicer system would be for everybody to have as much of everything they want. It looks quite peachy, unless you actually try to implement it.
In the US, a lot of science fiction (which, for obvious reasons, is popular with geek types) has a libertarian ideology. The obvious example would be Heinlein, though there are many others. I forget the historical reasons for this, but this phenomenon dates back to the 1930s at least.
The problem with Katz is that a lot of his articles are half-baked. Take this one for example; a rough and arbitrary taxonomy of the Internet, which was obviously more of a passing thought than any sort of thesis or theory. Anybody here could produce something like this off the top of their head, and have much the same effect, but Katz gets to masquerade it as journalism.
And his previous, longer articles aren't much better. In general they consist of a rehashing of stories from two days earlier, with a modicum of facile "analysis", pompously restating the bleeding obvious from the mantle of journalistic authority.
Classification is not equivalent to understanding. It is a useful analytical tool, but a lot of pundits, like our friend Mr. Katz, use it as an end to itself. When did this guy start squating on slashdot anyway?
Sorry, I'd disagree; not with the basic three eras (which I think are correct), but I think that you're not thinking globally enough. Maybe in the US you are starting to enter the third era, but even here in the UK the broadband era is at least 18 months away. What about Africa? India? China? The third era will only reach its full potentoial when the whole world has access to broadband. THAT will be when things really start getting interesting!
-- /. ID is lower than Bruce Perens'!
Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.org
My
A place where you can go to write all the silly, annoying, and useless stories you want, away from us normals.
Ahh, the good old college days...
Every year a new manager would take over the record store (remember records? =) just off the UMCP campus. Every year, I'd have to spend a week figuring out if my favourite bands were filed under Heavy Metal, Hard Rock, Rock & Pop, etc. or on the other side of my musical tastes, Rap, R & B, Sould, etc.
I always believed that when *I* owned a record store there would be two sections: Single Artist, and Multiple Artist. Single Artist alphabetically by Artist, Multiple Artist aphabetically by Compilation Title. Color code the spines by genres, if you want people to be able to browse by such, but if you intend to split the hairs of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, give me a freakin' map!
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
SARCASM ALERT
/way/ to organic to every fit into "continets", what about sites that span them? I can think of some CorpGodNets...or UnderTechNets
I love you man!
But i know i can't have your bud light
That was the bestest valentine's day present ever
SARCASM ALERT OFF
Seriously though, it's an intresting concept but in my opinon the 'net is just
Because nothing ever truly repeats, it's necessary to "pigeonhole" experience according to theories in order to sort some sort of signal from the noise. The error of bigots is the belief that no theories besides their own are true, and therefore that their pigeonholes are infact part of experience, rather than imposed over it.
Your approach of a series of scales for each feature (eg: moneymaking, preaching, having fun, self expession, informing) seems optimal to me.
I agree that partitioning is arbitrary, but some divisions juse seem to have arisen by themselves.. For instance, once you find one porn site, it seems to be linked to all the rest of the porn sites. if your opening page was a porn site, it might appear to you that the whole net is porn..
Or perhaps you are into information that is useful to people in military service. These sites are all linked together, so if your initial page was www.usaf.gov, for instance, one might feel that the whole net is about govermnent business.
Of course, there are sites that rise above these at a meta-level. These are the search engines, etc. The portals are often the gateways to the various subcultures on the web.
A fun way to randomly find new subcultures is to play a game i made up one day while bored.. The object is to find, using a search engine (any one will do) a single-word search string which returns exactly one link. The pages you find during this quest can be rather diverse..
-bob
Restrictions are prohibited. Be well, get better.
thanks for that picture ;)
....Since news, politics, sports, entertainment, science, consumerism and culture are all becoming indistinguishable. Put your candidates on eBay - complain about the other eBay losers in alt.flame.yousuck. Write some eBay candidate arbitration code and post it on your corporate webpage. Then follow the thread on cnn.com including the commments from everyone else talking about the other comment posters. Get a YTBI pro athlete to promote it on a tv channel owned by your isp. The next day you can hear two empty suits on C-span screeching about the great evil/glory..of candidate auctions even if the code is written by H1-B foreigners. Then somebody posts some shit about it on /. and 75% of the comments have something to do with Natalie fucking Portman or hot grits or why we love/hate/don't understand Jon Katz.
"My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone connected to it to hell." - - Igor Stravinsky
- Redundant Net (the storage and discussion of all a priori knowlege)
Happy Birthday to ME!pronoblem
In addition to the nine continents you listed, you forget three real important ones:
.mil
.edu
.gov
Remeber what the Internet was originally built for. You're probably right with the other nine, but a lot of people get government information (especially IRS forms and the like) from the 'net. The Military is still there, although not as big as it once was, and so are the universities, and all their researchers, and all the companies (like the one I work for) that support those researchers.
I think it's telling that the Internet has so turned from what people thought it was in the 80's and before (for those who knew about it at all) to what people think it is today, to the point where 'pr0n' is a bigger division than the military!
Anyway, good article. Keep it up.
true, true
Definitely agree that I missed these two..These posts are great..Remember, I never claimed to name them all..Just get the conversation started..Be interesting to see what we end up with at the end of the day..
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Uhmmmm, just out of curiousity, what ocean separates Asia from Europe? And for that matter, what North, and South America seem to be physically connected as well. Just via a more narrow connecting point.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
In summary, ya got the ages right... but this isn't yet the dawning of the third age of mankind, our last best hope for the . . . wait a minute . . . wrong group. . . . <*>
a fourth example to add to yours... folks that have to have a domain name for purposes other than resolving IP addresses. case in point: java packages (and I think perl some also) use the domain system to segregate the name space. I want to release java code, but don't have my own domain name to package it in, so wherever I put it I run the risk of conflicting with someone. (hint, it's already happened for some people.)
Which isn't to say that most sites don't tend towards being just one category. But many don't. Continents seems to imply large gaps between types that are relatively difficult to cross, which doesn't fit the ease with which you can expand an internet site to encompass extra areas. Of course, this isn't always done well.
The above seems a little web centric to me, which is not what I intend. "site" is just a convenient label to attach to a collection of internet services that share a common name. Something like Source Forge seems to embody this to me right now. It's a site that provides a range of Internet services, the most obvious, but not only, or even (depending on your view) most important, being web services.
Colin Scott
Colin Scott If you build it, they will be dumb...
I'm afraid this is just old school thinking of Katz.
There is no need to make divisions into sectors or whatever, the good thing about the Internet is that there are as many divisions as there are users. The experience is personal and unique.
Sites can fall into different 'continents' according to personal taste, what is a game to some is a business to others. And if there would be this strict division there would be a continent where somebody is 'coming from', I am coming from none of these continents.
I bet there could be a program written that parses Google's database for just this sort of thing - I could see it done, but it'd probably take quite a while to run. ... sadly i doubt it can be distributed because of the nature of databases. :-/ --onyx
--onyx--
There is a huge miriad of "continents" if we look straight at the case. What Katz shows is merely a glimpse of what most "mortals" can see at short range. And besides it is a typical view from american shores.
What about the X-Files Continent. Yeap it was pretty shaken down for the last two years. People have lost interest because there were too many "conspiracy-hunters" and snake-oil sellers around. Besides it was well descridited and taken down by some smart fellows around. But it is still alive and it is not just "Entertainment->Paranormalia" as once Yahoo decided to turn it in...
The "national" Continents. Each country possesses a lot of specificities. For example in Russia there is a well set tradition for compromates and flame-wars. In one point the whole Rusweb looks much like the guys of that old Gaul village in the popular French comics "Asterix". Some countries have a too sexist taste on the web. There is sex everywhere, even if you trying to look at the weather in some city. Other are tremendously nationalist. You damn find anything in a common world language
And even if you look ta Katz continents then you will find that things are far from being so simple. One cannot mess Religion and Mysticism in many points. There is Erotics and Pornography and their audiences are frequently far from each other. There is a big gap between Tech & Science and it is a typical mistake of techies to mess both things. And besides he seems to forget the Economist (it is not about commerce!) and Humanitarian groups (History, Psychology, Archeology, Philosophy). I believe they are not so small to be ignored. And I think they should not be simply put inside the Tech Continent.
This area of chatting on the internet has to be placed in its own continent because it contains everything previously mentioned. You can find bits and pieces off all nine continents here. It also has a culture quite of its own. The primary use of IRC has come to be mostly underground and sometimes illegal things: Trading pornography, pirated software (warez), cracks for software, various flood and Dos attack programs, and mp3's.
You know. it's fairly easy to sit at home in your underwear and listen to radio shows without a computer. :)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
just making it my personal mission to point out to everyone that is is not the real hemos he has a . after his name... darn posers...
I post links to stuff here
I'd guess DVD support in Linux sits on one of these zones, in an area of high geological activity between CorpNet, TechNet & CultureNet :-).
Actually it belongs to X-Net ... "forbidden pleasures". ;-)
Granted, these are all uses of the Internet, but how about the case that they're delineated enough to call them "continents of the Internet Planet?" Perhaps I haven't browsed far and wide enough, but it seems to me that "X-Net," "InfoNet" and "BuyNet" are all completely part of "The Corporate Internet" and subservient to its needs. And I'd say the majority of "CultureNet" is the same way, with the majority of the remainder consisting of people illegally trading the products of Culture(tm).
Even with the others, to say they're seperate is a bit odd. What, geeks, gamers, and Jeses-freaks don't buy crap, look at naughty pictures, or work at corporations? I'm sorry, I just don't see this rampant Balkanization this brief article posits.
This covers the .com's and .net's pretty well, but what abou the *.edu's and *.org's? I'm not sure all of the informational content from universities fits under TechNet. And the charitable/public interest content of non-profit organizations doesn't fit anywhere in these nine categories. How about 11 continents of the Internet: add Educational and Public Interest continents
----
"Oh, bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse.
*grin*
Sounds like a good handle. Why don't you register under it and stop being an AC? :-)
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Interesting concept, the continents. I thought about it, and they actually compare rather nicely to the real world. (Now, nobody shoot me for sterotypes, I'm just free associating here.)
North America-
The Corporate Internet-
The United States. Perfectly logical, right? Run almost completely by business interests, with strict policies in place that mostly get ignored.
InfoNet-
Mexico. Large land mass, very confusing, a lot of mixed messages. Lots of opportunity, lots of room for improvement.
TechNet-
Canada. This huge, sprawling land that most people look on as "backwards" and "slightly off", but is inhabited by highly intelligent, but quirky people.
Asia -
X-Net-
China and Russia. Nobody yell, it makes sense. It makes sense. It has the largest area of the world (internet), and is inhabited by peoples with very specific and old customs, methods, and personalities. You know, plus the cheap sex.
The Undernet-
Japan. Old, old culture. Having a slight setback lately, as the world's eyes are kinda clued to the CorpNet and the growing areas elsewhere, but a backbone of the world, and a place where new suprises come from every day.
BuyNet-
Africa. It's a jungle out there. Lots of old cultures meeting new ways of doing things, lots of upheaval, lots and lots of opportunity.
CultureNet-
Europe. Another place filled with oldness (movies, TV), but with a lot of young upstarts (Salon, Suck) and new trends making waves.
GameNet-
South America. Another jungle, with lots of ways to die. But also, plenty of adventure, with everything from aging ruins (NES, Atari) to dizzying new technological creations (PS2, Dreamcast) to explore.
GodNet-
Antarctica. A huge place filled with wonder, that almost nobody thinks about, but elicits a LOT of interest amongst a select few.
Quick comment...
I for one say I gotta admire John. He's in here practically every week, writting another article for us folks, amusing us, giving us his perspective on reality. He takes a lot of flak for it, gets a lot of praise, but either way, he's a man who gets noticed. I for one almost always enjoy your posts, John, if you're reading this. If you are, as MrP mentioned, giving in to your detractors, I would say ignore em'. They obviously are not nationally recognized writers, and thus have no reason to poo-poo your work.
In the immortal words of PopEye, "I've stands all I cans, and I can't stands no more!" Jon Katz, have you no decency? Each machine comes into this world with no association. No one labels them or forces them to be something they are not. But then the internet comes along and gives them domain names and web content. If that weren't bad enough, you come along and point out different races to belittle and condemn certain poor machines! How DARE you!
Now we'll have boxen with the InfoNet label looking down on the Undernet with disdain. GodNet machines will turn the other way when XNet servers are in trouble.
I submit that all machines are created equal! All computers, be they servers or laptops, be they labored with WinNT or finely clothed in Linux, are at their core, equal. Why you can't see that and must segregate and file these machines into boxes, I will never understand. Next thing we know you'll have them lined up by serial number, shipping them to camps for hosting porn or something. (And for those of you from Usenet, here's where I throw in the hat and lose the argument.) This post form Jon Katz sounds like something Hitler would say!
(Damn that felt good to post on St. Valentines day. Long live Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club!)
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
I definitely agree! That's all some of my friends use the internet for, besides e-mail.
There is a huge ammount of information being passed around on the internet these days for Government and Military purposes.
.gov .com .edu) .tec .alt)
Though dwarfed by XNet and CorpNet, this is a signifigant ammount of traffic that doesn't easily fit into your other categories.
You will also notice that some of these categories get their own domain classes. (.mil
It would greatly serve the internet, IMHO, to have domain classes for each of these "continents". (.sex
This is what DNS was designed for, and it's sad to see this feature go unused.
Thank you for not thinking.
It's really hard to delineate the Internet into distinct areas. Anyone who tries is likely to chop a lot of people into pieces, and leave them straddling virtual oceans (wow, deep metaphor).
:) ). So again, strata. Some people only buy books and CD's online, so there are still peaks, but they're flatenning by the minute. Slashdot flashes banner ads all the time, and now is owned by VA Linux Systems, so they are far from separate, and the gentlemen (Rob, Hemos) do protest too much.
.edu links. Few have personal backbone taps, so maybe those men are an island..
I agree with the areas defined, but I see them more as layers. After all, we all have varrying degrees of technical interest (even those without any, who uses the net, have some interest in tech). We all have some sort of a belief system, be it religious or ethical - and even a lack of gnosis is a system of belief.
Each of these strata can be more specifically divided, horizontally this time, so that the Belief Strata would contain not continents and oceans but peaks and valleys. Say you'd have a Catholic peak and a Catholic valley, correspondent to the strength of that belief held by an individual. You would also have a Taoist peak and valley. If you're on one peak, you can not be on another, in a particular strata - since religions, for example, tend to be mutually exclusive in the extreme of subscription (a devout Catholic tends to reject other faiths). But the neat thing is that you can be half-way up two peeks, or complimentary faiths. The valley between some two is not that deep, while between another pair it is abysmal.
We all check up on product info online, and most of us shop here, so the continental divide between the shopping continent and the religious one does not apply (unless your religion forbids online shopping
Commercial and ISP's are also not continents. They were before the net became ubiquitous. Remember how cool it was when Compuserve email could reach Prodigy for the first time. That's when the continents began to sink. A huge percentage of us reach the net via ISP, many via business access and many via
I guess that the membership of the net defies classification, since so many of us share interests of one kind, and are diametrically opposed in others.
Oh, and Jon, I hope that the brevity and 'pro-discussion' angle of your article is caused by lack of time, and not because we finally stuck it to the pachyderm after the interview.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
That, rather than focusing on an arbitrary distinction among sites, we should consider taking a more scientific approach to such a breakdown. For example, sixdegrees.com has a cluster of people they refer to as the "great cloud" (or something along those lines) because the people in question are all interlinked.
Since there are search mechanisms (google comes to mind) that are driven by who links to whom, it sounds as if the data exists to define 'net continents ("continets"?) based on interlinking volume. That is, sites among which the volume of hyperlinks is relatively dense would be lumped onto the same "landmass," and any comparatively sparsely linked regions on the graph (this is a !@@#!% big graph!) would be the "oceans" between them.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
has anyone ever proposed a DNS system similar to that on Usenet? I think it would be pretty cool for websites to be able to have any name they wanted with no suffix but instead a prefix. The good points would be you could make any prefix you wanted or use a number of commodity prefixes. Slashdot would be something like org.slashdot with subdomains org.slashdot.apache, org.slashdot.askslashdot, ect. The key to this DNS system would be the fact that one company wouldn't be given initial control over it which means competition would be high and prices for domain registrations would be cheap and it could be backwards compatible with the current DNS system.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I can think of a couple of ways to partition the Net, and neither fits what Jon Katz came up with. Since I've been a Netaholic a lot longer than he has, obviously I'm right and he's wrong. ;-) (jk; I have no idea how long he's been on the Net.)
.org, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net, and the never-used .int
:-) As before, some users may span categories, but I think the partition is fairly clean. Spooks and Censors are really anti-users, but they're too important to ignore. ;-)
First, if you want to divide the Net into continents, the cleanest, most logical way is to do it by either top level domains or by content types (essentially as defined by URLs). Since top-level domains are strongly US-centric, I favor the latter.
Top level domains:
.com,
Content types:
World Wide Web, Email, Usenet, FTP, IRC.
A few cases don't fall under the umbrella of one of the above models (e.g., Telnet). Call these rogue services "island chains". Some (e.g., LISTSERV) muddle the boundaries (like Asia Minor). But, for the most part, I'd say these categories fairly neatly partition the Net.
You may also want to establish another axis for user types, which seems to be more like what Katz does, only he mish-mashes users with domains, IMO. I think this is a weaker division, but I'll take a stab at it.
User types:
Email-only users
Consumers
Casual users
Bargain shoppers
Information junkies
Social users
Hobbyists
Freedom fanatics
Other fanatics
Pirates
Spooks
Censors
Does anyone feel left out?
I would argue that these divisions are fully orthogonal to one another, and the first two but not the third divide the Net neatly enough to partition it (in a manner akin to continents).
For a longer discussion, see this article from earlier today: http://slashdot.org/comments .pl?sid=00/02/11/185212&cid=125
Running your script on itself results in inoperable code: s/^([^. Maybe this is exactly the point you wanted to make.
From your comments, I get the impression you misread my article. I was not proposing to sort by content. My "continents" were content types: WWW, Email, FTP, Usenet, and IRC.
I think this classification holds up quite well, particularly in the sense that there is a large degree of redundancy as each community seeks to be self-sufficient. It also holds up under your recommendation to examine where people spend their time. I primarily live in Usenet, but I travel to Email and WWW frequently. Slashdot is a surrogate Usenet for me. Keeps me from getting homesick when I'm in WWW.
... For one thing, they're way too interconnected to apply a nasty old geographical term like continents to them. They're more like parts of Houston: there's no zoning, so you get large commercial districts (yahoo.com) that are next to (link to) little residential areas. Sure, you've got your super kickass, not-overly-commericial clubs (www.fray.org), and online, geeks even get to have they're own super kickass clubs (slashdot.org).
You've got your online IKEAs (my.mp3.com, www.real.com, www.ikea-usa.com), where you can get inexpensive, cool, functional, personality-free home (computer) furniture for the lifestyle you'd like to become accustomed to. Right next to them, you've got your Starbucks (www.salon.com).
Really, in terms of link-lengths, you don't even have adult bookstores and strip clubs sitting next to churches, although both establishments are a lot easier to find than they are in the real world, and the homeboy shoppin' network's got their own storefront now, too.
That's how I look at it, anyway.
-k. ^-^ ^D
It's inherently a part of the Geek Culture to break away from mainstream culture and define our own independent culture. There are many other cultures that do this as well, but we tend to be the most prominent on the internet, for obvious reasons.
What will be interesting is what the internet will look like in 50 years. With the mergers of large internet companies with large media companies (like AOL/Time Warner) we may see the internet fragment to where you will only be able to get to information services that are sanctioned by your provider. "Hey, you use AOL/Time Warner as an ISP? Well, don't expect to get your news from FOX or ABC." We may have an internet market where you have to choose your ISP based on what kind of content they can deliver... like no porn if you use Disney as an ISP etc, etc. The internet as we know it today might eventually become more of an "undernet". It won't provide the content that most of the masses are looking for, but it will still be there as a undercurrent, available to dinosaurs (folk like us who remember the way the internet used to be.)
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
I think the reaction he gets is partly due to us seeing so much of his writing without any other actual "essay writers" on this site. We see his pieces at least, what, two or three times a week? If I read something from ANYONE that often, I'd get tired of it. It's not personal.
We should reduce the frequency to maybe 3 times a month, tops, and add another writer or two to do the same thing.
What do you all think?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
...that most of the flames are posted on /., and most of his positive comments are sent directly to him via email...
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
Whilst I'd agree with his basic premise, I think there are a lot of fuzzy areas between the continents. Maybe a better theory is to identify each area as continental plates and the fuzzy areas as the points where the plates merge, leading to things like volcanoes, ridges, mountains and earthquakes.
:-).
I'd guess DVD support in Linux sits on one of these zones, in an area of high geological activity between CorpNet, TechNet & CultureNet
On the above premise, one could perhaps visualise X-Net, not as a continental plate, but as a huge oceanic plate, with deep abysses leading down to who knows where...
In addition, there are the many shallow seas of personal internet pages, created just becuase you've been allocated one.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Slashdot is owned by Andover, which is owned by VA, which is corporate. It readily falls under at least three of these categories. (Four if you count the trolling Natalie Portman ACs.) Besides, Slashdot doesn't have much to do with the Net of "scientists and researchers"; in fact, most of the locals are mere Linux-hugging quasi-geeks.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Well, then you are old - relatively, that is. Most of the local dimwits are either in the 13-18 year range or have about that same mental age.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Mental age is just that - mental age. It is a valid factor for classification. It doesn't have much to do with physical age, especially in our little fringe group. So your point is moot.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
How about CensorNet- the broken net where nothing works as it should and people live in fear.
Or some alternate names might be BookBurningNet, FundamentalistNet, AuthoritorianNet, FascistNet or Australia.
No, that was me. Sorry for the confusion.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Pretty good list, John.
Continents are a rather fitting metaphor, since even they aren't static. The tectonic plates shift, meld and sometimes grind against each other - I could wax poetic for quite sometime about these simliarities and what's happening with the "divisions" you described.
Some thoughtless types may think that they can pidgeon-hole people based on what type of sites they frequent, and therefore what "continent" they inhabit, or in a more sinister vein, should inhabit. The only thing is, that we have the capability to hop from "continent" to "continent" with the click of a mouse - we can reside in this world where ever we wish. If we could only transpose that to the non-cyber world - but there's no "Beam me to Punjab, Scotty" yet. *Sigh*.
If we could live anywhere on earth, it's rather obvious that we would get better perspectives on our fellow human beings, and there might be hope for this beautiful place callled Earth. That is the true power of the 'net - our hearts and minds can travel the world, and hopefully make it a better place.
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Ewwww!
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Has the role played by Universities and schools in building the Internet already been forgotten?
--
While I agree that Katz got it pretty much right, I honestly want just one continent - Hak Nam. I have been pondering starting something like this for quite a while. If you've read Idoru, you know what I'm talking about. With the advents of VPN encryption, it becomes more possible everyday. A group of servers hosted by people with varying degrees of connections, with their own internal DNS structure and ACL. Distribute the computing power among those servers and there you go. Add on IPv6 when it gets standardized and you don't have to worry about running out of IP addresses when everyone has a dedicated connection. And You get a transport that's meant to handle the kind of information that was passing through the Hak Nam in Idoru. Oh yeah and did I mention really strong encryption?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
While the term "continent" is misleading, the basic idea of separate internet communities is worth looking at. While any of these worlds is just a click away from any other, people in fact stick to their favorite haunts. I, for example, tend to stick to a small cluster of news and information sites and use Google as my search engine. The only thing I have purchased online is a Debian CD (now long since out of date). A huge number of people, on the other hand, never leave the links from a major portal.
As a species, it is very important for us to have a culture, and the culture we have is generally a combination of an initial choice of people or activites we like, followed by a winnowing away of the things which don't seem to fit our choice (even if we rather like them.) It is this tendency which the major corporations rely on in trying to steer the direction of our culture.
John's analysis may be cute and superficial, but some corporate schmuck is making a very similar analysis, and is going to try to turn it into money/mind control for the rest of us
I thought we agreed (yeah, right - like "we" can agree on anything) that pigeonholing is a Bad Thing. It's bad when high school students get pigeonholed, right? What about the goth who's also a stoner? What about the geek who's a decent athlete? The cheerleader who brings a gun to school? What about those who don't fit any category? Why is it okay to categorize the net, but not to categorize people?
If we must make categories, then rather than continents, with the implication that they're separated by vast distances, I think a better analogy would be a spectrum. The "colors" of the various regions of the net blend into each other.
Perhaps even that is too much pigeonholing. What about the porn sites or the information sites that charge for access or have expensive banner ads to pay the bills? Or the "God" sites that ask the faithful for donations? Some of them take in a lot of money - why aren't they ranked with the big portals and commercial sites? Where is the cutoff? Is it measured in dollars or hits or souls saved? Is there a cutoff at all, or do the types (like the various types of students in a school) blend into one another at the edges? Some may be a blend of more than two types, so a linear continuum is inadequate. A multidimentional continuum might be in order.
Oh well...
I think a lot of libertarians were early adopters of the Internet because so many of them were computer science/EE students. At least, that's how it was when I went to college. I wonder what the connection is.
What's wrong Lion-O? --Snarf
Wouldn't that be the 9 in-continents?
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
Ok, break out the nukes. Let's bomb that little island into oblivion.
look at me! im a moderator! moderater? moderatir?
fuck they will give these lil points to anyone
The one thing I have to say is we have to make DAMN SURE that BUYNet doesn't dictate what the internet, as a whole is..
Ipv6 will save us anyway..
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
The driving force behind the "new" economy is diversification. How do you classify a tech news site? News site that has some tech coverage? This doesn't work, even conceptually. And the X-rated folks won't ever let you put them on a separate TLD -- too easy to block.
Napster-Net
Thank you, O Geekmeister of the Geeks, for this completely objective and thought-provoking look into the topic of the decade, the Internet. No doubt this will spawn thousands upon thousands of debates and point-counterpoint discussions. The depth and detail you have gone into here is certainly worthy of my highest praise.
God bless you, Jon!
Levine
Monkeynet - Devolutionary supplies and info (subgenius.com, oldmanmurray.com, etc.)
A planet where apes evolved from men? Long live the apes.
I agree that categorization isn't something real, but something we impose. I've always felt that categorization was a useful tool when there's too items to handle each individually. The trick is to know when categorization is useful. . .
FreeNet: The huge libertarian presence on the Internet. If you ask why, it's because a lot of libertarians saw a good thing back in 1992-1993 and were "early adopters" of commercial Internet service.
If you ask why that is, I have no answer.
--
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
It doesn't matter if the correlation that Katz 'sees' was actualy there to see, for we the readers, or for Katz the 'author' to use the term in a loose sense.
Because we just read it, and since most of us hadn't ever tried to classifiy these things, his classification will stick to us, and we as users, and Katz as an author will begin to deal with the net conceptual as though these classifications held.
Which will enforce them.
So by writing this, Katz might have just planted a virulent meme, if it sticks.
On a lighter note: Have any of you seen the window$ based virtual pet games 'Catz' and 'Dogz'? I if 'Katz' is just a test market case for a virtual pundit game.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Don't forget GenealogyNet. Ever try to do a search on a person's name? There's tons of that stuff out there.
Much better than vanity .com domains, I think.
You're a suburbanite.
All the geocities/tripod/ate my balls/family photo/centered text/"Sign my Guestbook!"/*.* webring pages made by the jobless masses on netzero and freei who can't distinguish between a web browser and beer can, and send 50 joke emails to every family member and friend they know each day, along with the latest "AOL VIRUS WARNING". How could we forget them :)
You can't get that stuff off the web at all, at least not that I've ever seen... Get yourself an IRC client and join any of the #warez* groups on EFnet or somthing...
:)
Or just join a colage that has a residential network, and plug your computer into the wallsocket
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
In fact, this list of "Nine Continents" was one of the most interesting and thoughtful pieces that Katz has done on Slashdot. I agree with other posters that this piece should've been a lot longer. It would've been useful to hear how he came up with this list. Good job Jon Katz!
--
"Deep in the ocean are treasures beyond compare,
Deep in the ocean are treasures beyond compare; but if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
post by Jon Katz
I had breakfast this morning, but in our brave new world will there still be a need for breakfast? or even more compelling, will there still be a concept of morning? With our new plugged-in generation, I don't think we can overlook the possiblity that these things we take for granted will still be around
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
Sites without porn/ads? :) Doesn't really happen, because the ones that are simple and straightforward get overwhelmed by those that are that lazy. Warez are fairly ridiculous, just for the fact of all the work you have to do to get the stuff, and its usually a sliced and diced version. I used to be more of a warez puppy, but I've gotten to the point with games that I'll only pick and choose certain ones, and those are usually worth my dollar (or fourty).
Back to topic, anyway you've gotta have connections to find a decent warez server, knowing someone who has a genuine connection. Its like dudes. Follow this, you ever had a friend who is craving something smokable? Well, they usually say something like, "I called my dude and blah blah". Ya gotta have a dude to get warez. Thing is that dudes are usually flakey no matter what wareS they distribute. Not worth the hassle either way.
As for that 24 hour crap... Come on. Is it okay to steal something as long as you put it back within 24 hours? Its not. Those roms are just as illegal. People may bs around, put signs like that to soothe their conscience and maybe give officials some excuse if they come knocking, but I doubt anyone could fine a written, Real-Life law to corroberate that. Amusing, and it makes you feel better when you get them, but its still illegal.
http://www.somethingpositive.net Funny + bitter = comedy gold
X-Net (sex and dark and forbidden pleasures) Shouldn't that be XXX-Net and not the wonderous ISP?
Nine continents of the internet? Nine rings of hell? Discuss amongst yourselves......
You *DO* realize that it's probably your sister that's the one sending out dirty messages.... Don't you? :-) :-)
People are much hornier at 13 than later in life.
that's YOUR sister?
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
I can sit around in my underwear and listen to
"radio" shows.
In fact, I've started searching for music I want to
listen to, not what the local radio stations want me
to listen to.
SpamNet
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
I agree that in general Mr Katz gets more than his share of abuse. While I find myself disagreeing with him on issues, I always try to keep it at that level. Maybe I'm not perfect at that but I'd rather be brained than abused anyday. That also goes with the moderation I receive. Disagree, fine, but evaluate my contribution not my viewpoint.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I hate to admit it, but in this day and age, there is a disturbing ammount of generic political-garbage (everything listed at http://www.c-span.org/campaign2000/links.asp; all the dvd/(de)css stuff; most things listed at hnn; I don't know if this is just an evolutionary skin that the 'net has grown over itself, or if it would be considered a 'continent' of its own --gotta run, time for a .sig!
What about those gazillions of 'normal user' homepages (Hi, I'm Bob, my hobbies are..., here some links to my friends' pages which are as useless as my own)? They're hardly part of any of your continents...
All you've done is sorted a hierarchy from information. This does not make it a hierarchy your just limiting yourself to think of it as one. Think of all the maps of the world which put the northern hemisphere on the top. It's not on the top. You are deciding that the English speaking US centric world will be the internet and your definition of it's continents reflects that. What are you really trying to find out?
I think there are two vectors to define the internet right now -- BuyMyShitNet and FreeShitNet. MyNet encompasses all the Nets you describe. YourNet, is that ContNet or KatzNet, maybe limited. The important thing to realize about the Net is contributed nets where people are actually trying to make something for each other are more important, the BMSNet where the goal is only commerce is secondary. Of your nine selections, seven are BuyMyShitNets. My greatest concern is that BMSNet will convince every one that the net is a MALL and not exchange communities. The Corps want us to make all the maps with them on top. Which is what your doing. The UnderNet for instance, isn't under anything.
The largest part of the internet is the mass of home pages. Not because millions see them but because they represent millions of people participating and being a part of the internet.
Cheers Andrew
I could make an arguement that /. is more of a culture site than a tech site.
:-)
/. isn't really about technology - it's about geek culture. Otherwise we wouldn't have "It's funny, laugh" stories, or John Katz articles.
Happy V-day, everyone! Hope you all can find a cute opposite-sex (or same-sex if you prefer) geek or geek-ette to celebrate with.
No sig.
Check me out! I'm Katzy! I'm coining all these words and saying all this so that I'm the first person who apply general divisions to the 'net! Woohoo!
What's that you say? Yahoo! did it first? Who's Yahoo!? Oh, bah, they did that AFTER me! Duh.
Huh? Proof? Nah, that's a forged timestamp, I was first! Me! Me! ME!.
Katz' list is right on. But unfortunately, he' forgotten (or perhaps, would like to forget) what we can call HateNet. There are a great many sites out there that spread hate like a disease. Just as it's made us able to find out information quickly by the Internet, it's made hate messages from groups like the KKK more accessible. It doesn't end there. There are tons of smaller hate sites out there, sites that trash pop groups, corporations, etc. Even SlashDot occasionally becomes a forum for hate. I sometimes wonder if freedom of speech is a little "too free" on the Internet. But it's a worldwide forum, and I wouldn't want to be the one who decides to start policing the world.
You don't have to put-down someone all the time because they think different. Doesn't this make (most of you) recall how YOU were treated in school? Different, strange, out-of-the-ordinary? Can we not see the same effect here? I can personally attest to something of that nature. If you get told you're shit long enough, you sometimes believe it. If you would shut up and let the man give you something to think about, REALLY think about, and not tell him how horrible he is, maybe you would learn something. I remember the horrible days in school, and some of you may too. It may not be those people who flame him, but for those who do: shame on yourselves. You are no better than the bullies and assholes that badger and pick on those "different" than themselves.
You are exactly right, my friend.
Katz attempted to break down the Internet into "continents". A continent, by definition, is a partition of the set of land mass on a planet. Partitions are disjoint subsets of a set. Disjoint means the intersection of two subsets is the empty set. In other words, a place in Africa cannot be a place in Asia, etc. Katz's "continents" could overlap. Slashdot could belong
to InfoNet AND TechNet. Since there exists an element which belongs to the intersection of two of Katz's "continents", they are not partitions!
There are no special properties of Katz's stupid "continents" that make them worthy of being analogous to actual continents.
I wish there was a friggin' poll that suggested what college courses you'd force Jon Katz to take. I'd vote for Discrete Math.
Why bother classifying people by age? Maybe you make assumtions based upon age - I certainly don't. There are some near 50-year-olds (my father comes to mind) who have the "mental age" as you call it of a wild just-barely-driving teenager, and some "young people" who could probably whip both of our pants off combined and be more gracious about winning then we could either hope to be
Oh dear me. Can't have that, now can we?
Too much of everything spills into everything else. The Internet is the ultimate cosmic people soup. Look at Slashdot for instance.
Yes. We have both kinds of people here: Those who whine and those who bitch. How about that?
I say we disembowel Jon Katz for having the nerve to actually post something he thought was interesting! After that we can call his mom and brag. All in favour say "aye"...
And on which 'continent' do individuals live??? Say I have a web page concerning my life, ambitions etc. No one but my friends and relatives care about that information, but it's still out there on the net.
EgoNet?
MeNet?
---
also minimilist is
thanks
reply good
--
also minimalist is
thanks
reply good
--
What I was trying to do was ape those 'in/out' filler articles that magazines write when they can't think of anything else, the choices weren't supposed to mean anything in particular ;)
--
That there are over 100,000 idenfiable communities on the net. The 'Clever' algorithm identifies the communities using an extended idea of context...
My comment is, its interesting that Clever would be unlikely to identify the Katzegories[1] above , because the hyperlinks between (say) cocacola.com and fordmotors.com - as big corporates - are only in our heads.
Though it might be nice to see it try.
-Baz
[1] go on steal my neologism, I dare you. Soylent Meme is people...
For example that suit and tie lawyer may be a real stif but how do you know when he dosn't get home and say have a real funky time? Same goes with the internet and how you just can't categorize it.
Exactly. Just like those funky, colourful clothes (or, the simple, all-powerful "root" shirts) that "socialite" geeks wear sometimes is replaced by, say, a suit/tie/dress when they have to stand and deliver. The mirror has two faces. We're not in Euclidean space anymore.
Insert mind here.
I think he gets flamed as much because of HOW he says things as WHAT he says. Every time I read one of his articles, I get the feeling that he is claiming to speak for me. That's all well and good if we agree, but when he says "we of the slashdot community beleive X" and I don't belive X, I get irritated. It definitely cuts back on the vaunted Slashdot Feeling Of Community (TM) that Katz praises so highly, when major columnists for the site tell me I am not stepping in line with Group Thought(TM).
I start to feel like I have to shout "Hey, wait a damn second, some of us do NOT subscribe to this POV!" Besides, a lot of his articles are really more editorials, and those always spark dissagreement, or they wouldn't be worth writing.
My $.02 anyway.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
Yes, a very good post from which to discuss things.
.com realm or one of the others?
But why nine? And wherein should we place Salon.com, for example? Should it be in the
Will in Seattle
LamerNet, the lost continent of idiots, always plotting ways to invade the better continents.
AOLnet, don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
First of all, thank you for the short, consise article. Its was interesting and got its point across. Now was that too hard?
Second of all, alot of sites/communication on the internet crosses these boundaries. Eg Undernet and Culture. Games and Information.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I tend to think of the Internet as broken up into different regions depending on the primary intent of the people involved. Given that, there seems to be four types:
In the "people trying to get rich" I would place all corporate activitity and many X-rated sites. That's because the thing that motivates them is to make money. Since they are motivated to make money, their activities will eventually devolve into either becomming an "exclusive" hookup (VPNs), advertising like crazy (/.), or sell-sell-sell (Amazon).
In the "people trying to convert us" we have things like the "God" sites, as well as the racist sites.
In the "people having fun" category we have gamers, some technical folks (who apparently have fun writing code, though some of them are more "express yourself types"), and some X-rated sites where some guy with a digital camera is posting nudes of his wife on the 'net.
And in the "people expressing themselves" we have the whole art scene, as well as a lot of GPLed software sites and the like.
I think this is a better way of breaking up the regions of the 'net, partly because by knowing what motivates the people doing the site, you can sort of see in which direction they will "pimp" themselves to achieve their objectives. For example, we have 'www.fresnobee.com', a local newspaper site, with a "shop online" button. That's because the people running the Fresno Bee aren't interested in reporting the news; they're interested in making money reporting the news. And if they can make some additional money allowing people to shop online, why not? They're making money, after all.
Now of course people evolve and change over time, so sometimes these boundaries can be blurred. For example, the husband and wife posting nudes on the 'net for fun may suddenly realize they could make money charging for those pictures. Or the hacker who was having fun tinkering with stuff suddenly finding himself doing it as a form of expression because his 9 to 5 job doesn't allow him the luxury.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Interesting that Katz defines the epochs in terms of content and use whereas LP defines them solely in terms of the technology. Development of the web browser did indeed bring in the masses, but to continue to focus solely on tech is to ignore the cultural segmentation that does seem to be occuring. I agree that the tech toy(s) is(are) more fun than most people...but the emerging patterns of large masses of people deserves notice and comment.
Troll, troll, go away, find a better way to play. Like, in heavy traffic.
(BTW, couldn't impersonation victims could sue these trolls for damage to reputation? Subpoena the webserver logs, then the ISP logs, to track 'em down. Probably won't be able to get much money out of it, since anyone with a job would find better ways to spend their time than trolling, but hunting trolls could be a fine recreational activity. (Anyone want to take odds on a "Mr Slippery" (no dot) or some other impersonator popping up now that I've made this suggestion?))
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Ha-ha - well done!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Just as Europe and Asia is the same landmass, the net has many cross-sections which overlay and interconnect. It is entirely associative. There really aren't any distinct categories. There are news sites on tech topics with discussion boards. Is that news? Is that tech? Is that culture? The answer is YES. It has all those attributes. A lot of sites are basically AssociationNet. People who share similar attributes converge on these sites. Sites for pet lovers, sites for tech people, sites for game players, sites for alumni of institutions, sites for people of a given religion, sites for people who like porn. Wherever people share interests there is another strata. There is no "top-level" (which is the fundamental problem with URL naming)...everything is associative.
/part/ of. Perhaps that is the distinction that needs to be made -- inclusivity. I go to a store to buy something, but I am not PART of that store. I would consider Undernet, TechNet, X-Net, CultureNet, GameNet, and GodNet all under a superset "AssociationNet". CorporateNet and BuyNet would probably be in an "external" or commercial category.
Given the general rule of everything being associative and uncategorizeable, I do see an exception. There are sites developed BY the community, then there are sites developed by entities outside the community which just need a presence. I guess you could call this a split between "commercial" sites and non-commercial sites (even though many commercial sites are part of the "community" and many non-commercial sites aren't).
I would consider places like *news.com and *BUYMYCOOLWIDGET.com in the "external" group. They are places people go, but are not a
It would be cool, though, if the net could be surveyed against several general attributes (say, N), and plotted in N-space. That would be some cool geography.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
that's exactly the point of a network. it is a super set of the typical hierachy we've been dealing with for so long. every category (node) can have many parents and children. it's the very fact that these categories can be so intertwined that makes the internet so suited to capturing the complexity. there is absolutely nothing preventing dominant categories or hubs from being established - sharing sub categories.
- tim -= remove "-spam-" from address before spamming =-
Endless maze of porn ads, misleading links and self-spawning popups !
Notwithstanding the general distaste people would have towards such a broad geography of the Internet, I wonder if it isn't more misleading to consider these entities 'distinctly separate.' CorporateNet seems to be using its economic leverate to take over GamingNet, BuyNet, CultureNet and InfoNet at an alarming rate (one would only need to see the herd of acquisitions by AOL/Microsoft to see evidence of this). Perhaps their interest is only monetary in these acquisitions, and hence their limited control otherwise over the subnets leaves the separation suggested by JonKatz intact. Nevertheless, it is foolish to ignore the connection altogether. The best use of such a geography of the Internet is to answer questions like 'which fish is getting too big?' That is, we want to know when any one interest is dipping their fingers too far into too many of these 'continents.'
But rather than seeing distinct continents of the internet, it is probably more useful to think of them as overlapping subsets of The Big Picture. This way the consumers of the Internet at large aren't misled into thinking they can necessarily escape from one into another by clicking on a link to leave a site, or switching from one news/search portal to another...often times you're really not.
It would seem the whole thing boils down to the ol' First Law of Thermodynamocs: Things tend from order to disorder, and not the reverse.
Which would be the second law, not the first.
I think the reason everyone hates Katz is that he is trying to define our movement from the outside, and being the only columnnist on Slashdot lends him legitimacy as a spokesperson for our movement. Imagine for a moment other social/political movements. Suppose some suburban white guy in the sixties proclaimed that he could speak for the Black Panthers. Further suppose that he was the sole comentator in the Black Panther newsletter. I don't think that the members of that organization would be too happy about this. Katz is not part of the open source movement. The audience for his articles is not Slashdot, it is the rest of the media. When the media looks at Slashdot, they see him, and he explains it so they can understand. Therefore, Slashdot gives Katz the credibility to speak for us. The only way to mitigate the influence of Katz is to keep posting flames about him in the comments, and hopefully the media will see those too and decide that maybe he isn't the voice of open source after all.
Actually, Pangea was formed from other, even earlier continents.
The oceans are the areas of the non-net world that have not yet been strongly established on the net.
Some of these are quickly evolving, for example NGO's are somewhat represented by charity sites like The Hunger Site.
Others may never be represented well simply because technology is against the inherent nature of the offline structure, for example, the Amish. (Though maybe this example is just a lake on the GodNet continent?)
Presumably there are, or will be, fallen continents as part of the oceans. One example I can think of is the NCSA Announcement page, which from the time the web had roughly www servers, until it had about 4000, was probably one of the the most visited websites. It then slowly faded into oblivion, largely replaced by Yahoo, and search engines.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Yeah, but some people have an innate desire to categorize everything. Myself, I enjoy categorizing things, but it's not an obsession. I like putting all my heavy metal compact discs in a different place than my blues compact discs, for instance. Other people might use alphabetical ordering.
At any rate, I think Katz missed quite a few "continents", such as the warez sites, cracking/security sites, etc.
I don't mean this as a flame. Repeat, this is not a flame. But Katz just doesn't have the knowledge necessary to be writing articles like this. He doesn't know enough about the internet or its cultures/sub-cultures.
Closely connected with pr0n at some times, but in reality a completely distinct sub-culture. And, as many other cultures on the internet, this one grows stronger daily, and changes constantly.
I wouldn't exactly group 2600 in the same category as slashdot, as it seems (to me) to cater to a different crowd in general.
Going along with this, of course, is all the IRC channels, the news feeds (alt.binaries.warez.*, alt.hack*), the ftp sites, web sites, and everything else I can't think of off the top of my head.
I agree. I respect Katz. He is a self-made (didn't graduate college) man who loves to write. Ok, so he's not Fitzgerald but who among us is?
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
How about the Necropolis, or the Land of the Dead. i.e. this one These are ghost sites, floating in cyberspace, not maintained by anybody... ...
why exactly is it nessesary do slice up the
internet into 9, groups and why are they called contenents, doesnt this seem just a little
pointless ??
Scientists have recently dicovered that in the distant past the Net may have been combined into one large "Super Continent"
,being nicknamed as "Netgea", broke apart sometime around three to five years ago after strong tectonic upheaval in what would become the "Corporate Continent"
"As recently as 10 years ago when the Net was first becoming popular. All continents on the net were one and all life forms and services co-existed" says University of Facts That Nobody Cares About scientist, Dr. Mike Hunt.
As stated in what has now become known as "Katz Therory" the net is currently divided into as many as seven continents. Each containing its own unique life forms.
Dr. Hunt surmises that the super continent
that would be the biological tree, of course.
cheers,
sh_
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
First era, "Internet for techies", 1969-1993: Internet technology develops, rapidly grows in size as educational network and tech-corporate email gateway, spurred by government research grants and applications like email and USENET
Second era, "Internet for the masses", 1994-today: Internet enters into widespread use by consumers and businesses, spurred by development of the web browser graphical interface
Third era, "Broadband Internet", 1999-tomorrow: cable modem and DSL infrastructures remove bandwidth constraints and enable mass-market content delivery of all media types, spurred by the development of erbium-doped fiber optical amplifiers and dense wave division multiplexing.
--LP
I really enjoyed your column. I especially enjoyed the unusual shortness. ^_^ Anyway, I would have added one more continent: newbies. They're all around, and we can't ignore them. All we can do is try to make knowledgeable users out of them.
From reading his recent interview replies, I get the impression that Jon would never *ever* change his style just to appease some idiot slashdot flamers. He has more journalistic integrity than that.
:)
However, I'm sure he is quite capable of taking constructive criticism and even (*gasp*) learning from it. Or maybe he woke up this morning and decided to write an extra-short column just for the sheer hell of it. Who knows? His comment at the beginning simply demonstrates a basic knowledge of the comments people like to make about his articles, and a healthy ability to not take himself too seriously.
Jon has frequently stated that he appreciates thoughtful (not necessarily "nice") feedback, and I agree that people should post only that - not because I'm worried about his feelings but because I think thoughtless flaming is a total waste of bandwidth.
smallstar
i think all this negitivity towards his articles may be getting to him :)
Nah. I think, it being Valentines Day and all, that he had a hot date, and was in a hurry to turn this in
Communication is only possible between equals
When I went to school, I was taught that that concept was originated in Hegel's work.
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
Perhaps however he is using the term GodNet to encompass all religions. Many Wiccan and Satanic sites are exceptionally good reads (I'm partial towards the Wiccan sites myself, they seem to typically appeal to me more). So in the sense that the term is applying to all religions if one buys into his concept that there are distinct divisions then it is very much large enough to qualify.
Now as to if the internet can be split like that is kinda questionable. There are a lot of crossovers in my opinion. I see the direction he's viewing it but I'm not totally in agreeance.
That would have to be the military/NSA networks?
(MILnet as someone else posted) Since no generic person really has access to those networks...
Personally, I would prefer these areas to be more analogous to the different parks within Disneyland, no corporate ties intended. Instead of 1/2 - 1 hour waits for rides, it would be 1/2-1 hour downloads/reloads for files & pages.
:)
-Vel
A wise man once said "Don't believe everything that you read". Unfortunatly, when you come to trust a site's content, it can be quite tough for most people.
404 File Not Found The requested
Undernet? Xnet? Been hanging out on IRC networks a little too often?
It would seem the whole thing boils down to the ol' First Law of Thermodynamocs: Things tend from order to disorder, and not the reverse. Seems the Open Source movement (whatever that is...) would bear this axiom out.
AAhh...
To me the continents would boil down to:
Open Source vs.
Corporate Control.
Diametrically opposed, sorta segueing into Karl Marx's thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the two worlds will battle irreconcilably forever. There is no reconciliation, especially considering that there's a disturbing trend toward power not really being solely consolidated politically, but power being insidiously co-opted by corporate concerns: i.e.The Bottom Line.
AAAhhh...fuggddaboutit.
When it comes down to it, aren't we all really anarchists? Think it over...natural monkeywrenchers.
Eric Lecht
vinylone
"Minds were made to be blown"
Katz is a lost cause, he doesnt realize we stopped reading his stuff before he came to /. :) These are my opinions, therefore you can shove a live hampster up your rectum if you dont like them.
.mil, .gov, and .hzk weird domains that are foreign so you have no idea what theyre talking about. Also search engines fall in this category..
"Dark" the poets, ranters, scary-a$s anarchists, and wannabe-dark-culture people ("I like to hide in a corner, call me!" this happens a lot at my school).
"H4x0rz" the warezers, the flamers, the kids still thinking the only net connection available is AOL ("Uhhh what the hell are you talking about? An ISP means AOL!"), the pr0n sites, the carders (or those believing it works).
"Hackers" well yeah not the bastardized version. Hardware gurus, programmers, developers, whatever. The founders of the net, contrary to Al Gore's opinions.
"Underground" badassmofo.com, r33t.org, geeklife.com, news sites devoted to bringing you the sweet news that relates to YOUR life, the life of living underground. OTP! woot!
"Gamers" places that havent been bought out by gamespy, namely planetgimp and oldmanmurray. These provide REAL reviews and news of games, not the "well its not too great but they gave us money so YEAH IT ROX DOOD" people.
"Stalkers" the fan sites, and you wont believe how many sites that is.
"Business!" yes they all fall under this category, from ebay to etrade.
"Freaks" these are worse than the Dark crew, they devote their pages to really as$ nasty animal pr0n (STILEPROJECT.COM), mail order amputee-bride links (STILEPROJECT.COM), a$s nasty pictures of as$ nasty things (STILEPROJECT.COM), and dancing hamsters (hamsterdance.com).
"Other" the
Now find me a site that doesnt fall into these categories!
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
WAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSUP!
WAAAAASSSUPPP!!!!
WZZZUUUUUUUP!!!
WAASSSSSSSSSAAAAAAAAAAWP!
WZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP!!!!!!!!!
so whats up b?
havin a bud, watchin the game.
TRUE.
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
I think the breakdown is probably valid. And the primary reason it is happening is obvious. This is a competition for what is often called mindshare, but which is more fundamental than even that. We are spending our single most precious resource here: time. And few of us have the time to spend on all of these things in depth.
:-)
However, I don't think that the analogy with continents is correct. Perhaps a better analogy would be with either cable channels or with magazines and newspapers. The reason is that we don't have to move physically to change our allegiance from one to another. In fact, we don't have to switch completely, and reallocating our time from one to another is even quicker than dropping one magazine subscription in favor of another. It is as quick as changing channels. And when you channel surf on the net, you never have to miss your favorite show.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
'Bat Out Of Hell' would be in 'rock', and no one in their right mind would buy anything newer than that so I simply would'nt stock it. Blondie would be kept out of sight. There has been many a music store visit that nearly involved throwing up as I read through the alphabetic bins: 'Beatles, Beastie Boys, Bee Gees, Blondie.. Gasp.. Hurk.. Someone get me a garbage can! Hurk..'
.sig: Now legally binding!
>Just like you wouldn't go to North America to
> mine raw diamonds (usually)
Why not? Canada produces the 2nd or 3rd most diamonds in the world, AFAIK.
Discuss among yourselves:
Is Katz getting verklempt(sp)? Sorry, when I read that I couldn't help but think of Coffee Talk.
Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
I believe IRC deserves a continent. Or perhaps an ocean?
- mipe -
PeopleNet -- personal web pages: from geocities (DumbNet! or MahirNet) to the more advanced (any cobination of InfoNet/CultureNet/TechNet/X-Net/UnderNet).
SchoolNet -- schools and colleges -- kinda TechNet/InfoNet hybrids...
Sorry.. I will end my tyrannical over-protective older brother rant now.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
Just like you wouldn't go to North America to mine raw diamonds (usually), you wouldn't go to the GeekNet type sites to mine raw international news.
"Anyone who can't laugh at himself is not taking life seriously enough." - Larry Wall
Nevertheless; I think you missed out on the "Hobbynet" where people just can relax and read up on things they like. Offcourse this one is also very close to being related to the 'info' topic. So I don't think its possible to split things up like that.
Hmmm... how can these be distinct when theyre is obviously an overlap between The Corporate Internet and BuyNet as well as BuyNet and CultureNet. Slashdot is really a CultureNet, not a TechNet. It just happens to be a CultureNet for TechNet-type people. Likewise, GameNet is a CultreNet for people who belong to the Game Culture. Similar to GodNet. Moreover Slashdot is a weblog, so by your definition that makes it a part of Undernet. But from what I understand CmdrTaco and Hemos live above ground, so it's not exactly subterranian, now, is it?
Oh, yeah, and hyperlinks join all of them together. Maybe "old media" transposed onto CorporateNet (or was that CultureNet?) hasn't quite figured out hyperlinks yet, that day is coming (or did come when CorporateNet/XNet/BuyNet AOL bought CultureNet/InfoNet/CorporateNet TimeWarnet).
Thanks for your timenet.
Amitnet Dubeynet
What would you do with Blondie and Meat Loaf?
I don't know if I made a boneheaded move or something, but I thought the parent of this advocated only two different categories: Group or Single. That's why I asked about those two, as they could be considered either. Besides, I'd split the categories up much more if it were up to me. There's be a whole subsection for '80s New Wave bands with known homosexual lead singers. That's where all the good stuff came from anyway.
I would call that Bob'sCatNet
Well, sort of similar to the above comment, I think it's fairly easy to find parallels in the formation and arrangement of Earth's land mass, as well as the "continents" of the internet.
'In the beginning' we had a "supercontinent", most sites were closely bound, and similar in size. Slowly these drift apart, and smaller "information" masses were formed. This continued slowly until the great explosion (circa. 1994), which has ended up with large different "continents", some more closely bound then others, but still leaving people with the ability to easily travel from "continent" to "continent" with relative ease.
It may be noted that it _is_ possible to be snarled in the geographic complexity of some regions (Pr0n pop-up consoles anyone?), and people still tend to favour one major area over another, while perhaps having a few other "holiday" destinations in other regions.
And I think that's stretching that construct far enough, don't you?
A not so serious TLD proposal..
;-) .edu The Official Internet (``Designated WebSites'' run by the govt, or educational institutes)
.rnd TechNet (geeks, nerds, scientists and researchers, sites like this one, c.net)
.net The Undernet (subterranean but thriving mailing lists, Usenet groups, messaging systems, Weblogs)
.org FreeNet (libertarians, anarchists, free software nuts like myself
.new InfoNet (news and information)
.com The Corporate Internet (the dot.coms, portals, big ISPs, e-traders)
.biz BuyNet (auctions, products, retailing services)
.god GodNet (the much overlooked but vast hive of spiritual)
.cul CultureNet (salon.com, movies, TV, pop culture, MP3s, DVDs)
.xxx XXX-Net (sex and dark and forbidden pleasures)
.gam GameNet (the rich, complex and rapidly growing world of gaming)
.mil MilNet (spooks, crew-cuts, and assorted tough guys)
.gov,
.ppg Personal PageNet (pages nobody but their creator visits)
.nut LoonNet (the doped out, totally wacky pages)
I can safely say that the concept of partitioning sites into destinct categories is not really all that accurate. Generally I would think that when you look at the net you are looking at the creativity that created it and are seeing various facets of people who inhabit it.
For example that suit and tie lawyer may be a real stif but how do you know when he dosn't get home and say have a real funky time? Same goes with the internet and how you just can't categorize it.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Rather than describe the division by sites, I'd tend to think of it as divided by the people who make up online communities / the types of people who actually use the sites, rather than the sites itself.
Typical Slashdotters associate with the open source / Linux movement. They typically don't hang out at big .com sites and "portal" sites that are taylored for newer users or non-technical users. However, there are clear cases when the use of a technical person and a non-technical person will overlap. In this case, the same site is visited upon by many types of people.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
what about the LUSERS. You know... the peeps that have a hard time understanding why the button labeled power would turn it off... don't they deserve one?
There have been a few articles about maps of the 'net but this is the first time I've seen it considered to give the map continents. The idea is appealing, but doesn't quite work.
There are surely "undiscovered" (not merely unmentioned) continents... but maybe it would be better to consider that they can and do overlap. I'm fairly sure the Corporate and Buy overlap, as well as Corporate and X overlapping. X and God likely do not overlap, not too much, at least, however.
With this, maybe it's more 'regions' in a n-dimensional (n=9? Who knows). space. This does of course muck the whole easy to picture thing that a continent view yeilds, but may be more accurate. An intersting exercise.
Yes, an intersting exercise. But not, as far as I can tell, one with utility -- one can use the 'net fairly well without this view of it. And having this view doesn't improve the usage, does it? If anything the 'under' part may be underused or misunderstood by most. Esp. usenet. I would also consider adding IRC to this region, and maybe a different name as there is more than just under.net out there.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Ok, my post is offtopic, and I accept the tag. But how the hell is someguy's post offtopic? Katz says "Please feel free to add your own." Presumably, he meant with posts.
So someguy adds the monkeys, DIRECTLY responding to the article. Offtopic? His post was the polar opposite of offtopic.
What the fuck are you moderators on?
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
Everything from the relatively mainstream political parties and pressure groups, through to absolute f**king lunatics (holocaust deniers, gun-nuts, conspiracy theorists, KKK wannabees, et al) have staked their claim on a little piece of cyber-space. This is a little-discussed aspect of the internet, but I think it deserves more attention, as it's one of the more real dangers. For example, if you happen to believe that ice-cream is the work of the Devil, and all your friends just laugh at you, eventually you learn to let the matter drop. If however, you find alt.satanic-plots.icecream, and spend a few months conversing with other like-minded (to use the term loosely) individuals, you might eventually convince yourself that you're on to something, and before you know it, you're parking truck-loads of fertilizer outside ice-cream parlours. Certainly there are some news-groups and web sites that are pedalling seriously dangerous ideas. And I'm not getting onto any sort of "censor the internet" soap-box, (anyone who thinks you can just doesn't understand) but there's a lot of really scary people out there, and they're networking far more effectively than most of the "normals".
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I don't know - Katz is a big boy and has repeatedly stepped up to defend himself, as seen in his recent Ask Slashdot responses. I agree about posting on-topic responses though, since that is supposed to be the whole idea of this forum.
One of the fastest sites I've seen is ftp.twoguys.org.. I've gotten 1.5 mbps (that's megabits) - T1 speed - from them on bellsouth ADSL.. They host a ton of Unix/Linux related mirrors.. very nice site.
-palp
Of course we can lump the internet into big catagory chunks. The human brain works that way. We lump beagles, collies, blood hounds, and poodles into "dogs". We lump bees, ants, fleas, and roaches into "insects". We lump Bill Gates, Pat Buchanon, and Satan into "Demonic Beings". It is just human nature to catagorize, this only indicates the internet is being used by humans.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
More Katz clue-lessness. Okay like many of you, I live on North America, but I hardly ever think of myself as a "North American". Similarly I rarely see these broad groups forming explicit separate areas of the Internet.
Take GodNet. Don't even try to tell me something like an extreme right wing site like GodHatesFags.Com, a mainstream Christian site, a Wiccan site, and maybe some Satanist wannabe site are all part of the same Internet bloc.
Much the same problem goes for the other attempted typologies.
Hasn't Katz learned anything? You just can't pigeonhole the web into the sort of neat little cubbyholes folks like Katz want to do.
What about a TLD for people's individual sites? Not a home-based business, but just a page set up for oneself. Like .per or .ind or something like that.
.exp (Experimental Use)
.llc (Limited Liability Corp.)
.lnx (Linux)
.ltd (.com alternative)
.med (Medical)
.nic (Network Information Centers)
.noc (Network Operations Centers)
.porn
.xxx
Also, AlterNIC has the following domains:
See here for the list and more info. Also, it is apparently possible to register an entire TLD. (.msft, anyone?)
He just wants us to think he's making his stuff shorter. This was just a fake, a feint before the big blow. LOOK OUT.
Katz's come up with a new paradigm. There's a blatant division of internet resources, though I hadn't looked at it like this before. (Where would someplace with a political agenda, like a campaign site fall? Certainly not News and Information...)
Dividing up the pie this way might be a precursor to "acceptable use" laws, though. Better never to have made the distinction, perhaps. Too much "us" and "them" as it is.
KATZ: Pleasantly short column. Does this count as a column? Are you making fun of our attention spans? Does your karma get you moderated onto the main page? I don't think anyone can complain, because you do generate more comments in your threads than anyone else.
Keith Schuler had similar ideas, except where they were different.
-- Chapman's Observation #1: Nothing is ever simple
Why not consider that although Jon's views aren't necessarily the main they are new and produce interesting discussions. And maybe ideas that will lead to good things in the future.
As for the continents idea, it is interesting. A lot of people will start out life on one continent. Someone signing up on AOL may have a hard time initially realising the internet exists outside of the corporate. Older internet users will be more aware of the `underworld.'
I think it holds, although of course there is a blurring at the edges. I use corporate sites when it suits me, for example.
Woah! A short column from Katz! I think I hear the earth's core freezing up. What's even more unlikely, I wish a Katz column was actually longer to explain his reasoning behind the classifications. I never thought I would actually want more Katz...
Anywaym, seems like many of these can be subsets. TechNet, GameNet, GodNet and X-Net are arguably just a very large neighborhoods in the umbrella of the CultureNet. (Geek culture, Xian culture, etc.)
Some of these need to be rearranged and re-edited too. For instance there are many CorpNet sites which are part of other categories like BuyNet etc. I think you need to concentrate on the actual content instead of who puts it up. Basically the internet has communities and services. Slashdot, tv, etc sites are communities. Auction, eBusiness, and most corporate sites are almost pure services. Need some sort of EduNet section in there somewhere too.
Still, cool idea. Thanks a lot.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
As time progresses, I think the lines between the subsets of the net will blur. Of course, not all of them really can blur together, but I think merging and meta-meta-meta-information sites are the wave of the future.
For example. X-Net does not really blend that much with the corporate internet, but could be considered part of the undernet. Obviously the "BuyNet" and "The Corporate Internet" are/have been/will continue to merge, and many of the others will continue to do so as well.
for the purposes of examining the internet, i think it's important to look at the function of each entity.
off the top of my head i can think of a couple:
interaction
fantasy
information
commerce
(entertainment?)
you can pretty much merge most any of those four ideas (fantasy gets a bit hard) and get a site on the net that fits it (and i think you can fit most sites into one of those categories)
example:
commerce + interaction = epinions, amazon, ebay
fantasy + interaction = everquest
interaction + information = slashdot
information + commerce = consumer reports type sites.
yes, my ideas are influenced by Net.Gain by Hagel and Armstrong, but I don't think I'm quoting them directly.
i'm not always right, i don't claim to be right, i'm just offering my ideas for further discussion.
I think a better way of describing the Internet (if such an undertaking is possible or worthwhile) might be to define categories for the character of the individuals who are part of it.
For example, there are users, like my 9 year-old sister, who don't really care what makes things go, who use the 'Net solely to exchange instant messages with their friends who live a block away.
A small gradation away might be the so-called "script kiddies," who giggle as they buy themselves a far-removed part of "hacker" culture in the form of destructive software.
On the other end of the spectrum are people who comprise the vast, dark, erudite (and sometimes vulgar) mob that allows the Internet to boast McDonald's-like statistics: Readers of Slashdot tend to be of this ilk, and so are the people who traded warez on dial-up BBSes or drew ANSI art or did things that no one knew about (and wouldn't ever care about, or so they thought).
...but I can't seem to find two of which seem to be thriving as well...
...Chat rooms and discussion forums.
Course, many people would argue that discussion forms themselves are just parts of other web sites, but then there's also MUDs, FreeNets, Telnet BBSs...
How bout something like a "CommNet Continent" as well?
...but I can't seem to find two of which seem to be thriving as well...
...Chat rooms and discussion forums.
Course, many people would argue that discussion forms themselves are just parts of other web sites, but then there's also MUDs, FreeNets, Telnet BBSs, Instant Messengers (MIRC, ICQ, AIM, etc)...
How bout something like a "CommNet Continent" as well?
Yes, even though I usually don't agree with Katz, this is definitely something I've noticed. IMHO, its partially because webmasters tend to focus on one thing in their site and link to related sites. And people tend to browse sites mainly related to their interests. Good article, Jon. Might be a good idea next time round to elaborate on this some more?
-RickHunter
--"We are gray. We stand between the candle and the star."
--Gray council, Babylon 5.
Dave
Yours and ours, the FreeSpeechNet! ;-)
Personal sites that have no real purpose of direction but to be a sort of online jorunal or collection of someones thoughts and interestes, ie web cams, personal homepages, rants etc etc. I guess my own site falls under that category.
Maybe I'm old or something (26), but I remember when she was in "Beautiful Girls" as a 13-year old. I was well into adulthood when that was released. The whole idea of her as a sexual object is kinda disgusting to me.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
First off, the thought of Jon Katz kissing me makes me want to vomit.
Granted, it was short as promised but nonetheless he manages to spew garbage as usual... The net is much too diverse to be broken up into any categories so simple as what he has attempted to list above.
Too much of everything spills into everything else. The Internet is the ultimate cosmic people soup. Look at Slashdot for instance.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Fish! LipHo
Katz's classification looks quite similar to some of the medieval systems (greek philosphers here, spanish there - like in the Name of the Rose). There is a long way to the more modern classification system.
And yes, although the librarians have had some amount of success, they have come to realize the magnitude of problems in classifying material, or even sorting it into alphabetical order...
In Murphy We Turst
I have had good luck with my high-speed access so far. I just got Bellsouth ADSL a few days ago, and I have been able to get nearly full-speed transfers at about any time of day. I seem to notice that most of the delays that I do experience are from the smaller pipe on the side of my connection.
A web site that I noticed that has a good connection to test your bandwidth is www.mp3.com. I seem to always get full-speed downloads from there. I almost always get a transfer rate exceeding 1400 kbps when downloading files from their artists.
The beginning of an "age" is timed with the beginning of a change, and that change has already happened.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
I think the DoSes that took place prove my point. The "Kiddies" have a knack for pissing off hackers and users alike. They piss off hackers because they only intend to destroy, while a true hacker intends to find information about sytems and gain access to discover. These ppl have become a rarity on the net and the group known as "script kiddies" have taken their place. This group makes admin and hackers alike mad because they can be anyone. anyone with a mouse and a keyboard can become a script kiddie easily. The real hackers are on a quest for information, something that the script kiddie yearns to mimick, but fails at so often.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
I think the DoSes that took place prove my point. The "Kiddies" have a knack for pissing off hackers and users alike. They piss off hackers because they only intend to destroy, while a true hacker intends to find information about sytems and gain access to discover. These ppl have become a rarity on the net and the group known as "script kiddies" have taken their place. This group makes admin and hackers alike mad because they can be anyone. anyone with a mouse and a keyboard can become a script kiddie easily. The real hackers are on a quest for information, something that the script kiddie yearns to mimick, but fails at so often. There are a few that change their ways, but these are few and far in between.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
I'll bet that every time Slashdot's load delays, it's because someone's Granny just sent out the "GOOD TIMES" bulletin to a list that would make a pro spammer envious. Nobody wants to tell her that they don't want to read her mail -- It would crush her to know what we think. So day after day we hammer the delete key and wait for her to sign up to the big ISP in the sky.
This would be DependsNet (TM) the Internet In-Continent.
4
The Net is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than Linus.
Daily stuff (slashdot, user friendly, sluggy freelance)
My stuff
alternative stuff
anonimity info
bpd info
comics
food
gardening
friends & family
magick
money
news
queer stuff
serious & science
severely silly
shopping
SM & sex
Work stuff
ASP
browsers
cgi & perl
components
graphics
Java
JavaScript
page design
promoting
services
VBScript
work sites
Usenet! A whole other category - mostly the alt groups, but some soc groups too.
I knew organizing my bookmarks this weekend would come in useful...
Teen-Net... all the lame AOLers that hang about in chatrooms trying their first taste of cyber.... :) -- Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.
The opinions contained in this document are in no way expressed.
The ever-growing section of the internet that blantantly disobey the rules of nettiquite and then turn around and act like brats when they get told off ("Well, I'll do whatever I want, you're not the administrator, you can't tell me what to do!!"), blah...
;)
And LARTNet, the place where the administrators send them when they finally get on thier nerves one time too many.
OK, so IMHO X-Net is the Eurasia of the internet continents. I mean, even my mother, who's most adventurous web jaunts take her to the likes of bluemountain greetings (ooooooooh) stumbled on the stuff. And now I'm on a ton of porn-email lists due to the following - ringring:this is el guapo. wife:what's that search engine you use? elguapo:hotbot. 5 minutes later - rinring - elguapo:this is el guapo. wife(angrily):why'd you tell me to go to that website?? yup - she went to hotbod.com. (and of course she had turned cookies back on) Now I get a daily dose of "If you're under 18 do NOT read this message". This, of course, guarantees that a tennager WOULD read it. Oh well...
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Shouldn't Al Gore get his own continent where he can lord it over all other political candidates?
After all...he did invent the internet.
Katz, after writing a book about geeks and everything concerning the "recent events in Colorado" should know that putting everybody in a neat little box with a label on it is a Bad Thing.
There is no label that fits me. (And it's not because I'm strange, since "strange" itself is so relative it loses all meaning when referring to people.) So why put labels on parts of the Internet? What will it signify? The kind of people that hang around? All this will only fuel prejudice, like fear of the so-called "Undernet".
GodNet? Don't forget the thriving SatanNet too. Doh, time to wash the sacrifical goat's blood off of my keyboard, nuts.
The whole pirate culture of warez, free p0rn, script kiddys, and stolen TPM reels. It might be me but these sites are everywhere or a select number of people have a lot to do.
RipOff-Net, or maybe Fraud-Net
Ways to dishonestly extract your money from you using the nets ability to give high gloss to the flimsiest fly by night fraudsters
LinuxOne ?
For instance i thought i was going to be reading that if you were australia, the only way to reach US servers was through certain links, isolating .au from the rest of the internet. Or the only way out of certain towns was through say some ISPs network, which would then dump you onto some slow packet loss plagued public exchange (Mae-????), effectively crossing an ocean or something.
i could see @home cable subscribers being one continent, People on CA*NET or i guess just divided by different backbones.
would have been more interesting than content divisions...
Pseudnet - a portion of the internet where pretentious intellectuals impress their contemporaries with the extent of their vocabulary and verbosity.
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
The Internet is becoming increasingly important for education. The University of Alberta gives each of their students an email account and access to the Internet. Many courses, even in such departments as Religion, require the use of online discussion boards or post information on web pages.
Some colleges and universities are even offering distance learning over the Internet. This is becoming increasingly popular.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
(****PRIOR ART****) You could use this theory to map out the net and build the first truly useful portal site.... (****PRIOR ART****)
---Bless those silly trolls---
Don't forget about the infamus NINJA net!
I nominate Cmdr. Taco as President for Life of Tech Net.. and hopefully he'll push the button and nuke the dot.coms back to the age of moveable typeface.
Damn...why didn't anybody tell me the first era was over ?
One of the important implications of claiming there are "continents" on the web is that each continent, with its own culture and habits and (most important) patterns of use may end up with different structural design from the others.
For instance, Bill Joy of Sun argues in this Techweb piece that there are "six webs," each with different uses and needs.
Whether you call them webs or continents, will they remain associated? Will there be new means of accessing each one? How long will the web model last? Will Internet architecture develop layers to meet the varying needs of the different communities that wish to be online, but not in a cookie-cutter way?
In other words, beyond the "cultural" differences on the web (which sometimes mirror, sometimes amplify and often usefully distort cultural differences in society), what will the physical implications be, in terms of how we connect?
A. Keiper
____________________
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
For myself, I enjoy all of Katz' columns, in the same way that I enjoy reading almost anything that has a semblance of readability (and that's not to say that Katz writes with only a semblance of such -- I find the grammatical problems mentioned by others to be far less prominent than might be. Certainly less prominent than the grammar/spelling problems in most of the posts). I think that the most useful aspect of this article is that it makes you think. Read the posts. Even the people who disagree often have something to contribute to a discussion about the issue -- how to categorize something so vast, and quite possibly an entity innately immune to the human tendency to categorize (for more on that, read the vast "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker). If I found myself in Katz' admittedly privileged position I would almost certainly take advantage of the opportunity to create discussion around topics that I would like to know more about. And this is precisely what he has done with this piece. Whether he agrees with the categories he has proposed, and whether he sees them as the be all and end all of categorization, I'll leave to the philosophers.
Nicholas Ragaz
This is not a shining example of grammatical perfection, but please ignore that for now. Thanks.
If you're interested in the actual geography of the net rather than a theoretical one, check out this page for some cool research on the geographical distribution of domain names. It's by a dude named Zook, who is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley in the Dept. of City and Regional Planning. Neat maps.
circa75.com
If one of us submitted this useless dribble it would be rejected...likewise if we posted it as a comment we would be moderated down or receive replies like "duh"...so my response is "DUH!" I don't dislike Jon Katz I'm just still waiting for a quality post from him. Maybe we'll get one when he starts to understand we don't care so much what he believes. Moderate me down...make me cry...see if I care.
BakaNet? This is where all of the idiots who really shouldn't be using the internet belong (and there are way too many of them). Many AOLers fit in here, as well as script kiddies who think they're l33t h4x0rs, anyone who's ever begged for a ROM on an emulation message board, spammers, trolling AC's (/me uses item "Soft" on Natalie Portman and ends the madness!) and Jeff K.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I love the length. I dig the topic. I'm looking forward to the discussion (I haven't looked at it yet).
I think there are quite a few other ways to categorize the "places" of the Internet.
Maybe you could plot out every site on several of these axes and come up with some kind of map of the space like a network topology but with more dimensions and less usefulness to people who aren't smoking anything.
Corporate/Commerce Net - .coms and trading, conglomorate news site (cnet, nytimes.com, abc, cnn, zdnet), ISPs, developers Info/Tech/Geek Net - slashdot, root shell, maccentral... other platform/topic specific news and forums Community and Zine Net - salon, word.com, other culture sites, etc. Ent. Net - mp3s, streaming stuff, porn, flash sites Personal Net - homepages, and static pages put up by non-pros for theirself or their elementary school or whatever Edu net - public research & development, universities, etc. Old Net - IRC, newsgroups, lists, gopher, wais (all useful to some extent, much more useful a long time ago... i still love 'em. IRC, of course, will always stuck... some things in this category may be on their way out - others are simply well used and matured services old doesn't equal bad or obsolete) of course stuff overlaps... but this is how i see it.
to clarify... my 'continents' are more like idealogical levels... each continent may have the same subject matter or content - but the audience may be different or the professional/corporatization/whatever of it may be different.
of course things will overlap... in an earlier thread someone had 4 groups that, when combined, made all the types of sites out there. take that forumla and plug it into my "levels" at each level and one has what i see...
what about the continent for raving idiots who write articles about topics they know little or nothing about? let's call it the "katz" continent?
-hemos
I'm hemos., aka Jeff. Bates.. I help run this site, along with Rob. Malda.. I handle books, and generally posting storie
PersonalNet... all the countless useless personal pages "I love my cat", "Hi I'm Eric and im 14 years", "Friendship page, send this on to 184612458 other people and you'll get a friend for life" and "Football-is-my-life" pages.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
As much as itpains me to admit it, GodNet is all too small. Most of the sites out there, at least from a Christian perspective, are frankly pathetic. And, unfortunately, nobody looks at most of them because they suck.
I have heard of this 24-hour software trial before. My understanding of the matter was that a piece of software is bought by and individual, and instead of that person installing the software onto their own computer, they allow others to "check it out" for a short period of time. (i.e. 24 hours).
However, if more than one person has this same software "checked out" at the same time, this would clearly break the agreement to use the software on only one system at a time. I don't think there are any special laws to allow this.
I'm not as big a Katz hater as the seeming majority of /.ers, but this is senseless twaddle on a par with "Reefer Madness." Distinct categories? Please. /. as Tech Head Central? Umm. . . click [here] to buy foo.
Know what would be a fun game? JKatz is riding a wave now, due to his new book-- he's pundit du jour. Why not let's spread this article far and wide, get it into the digest pages of Time, Newsweek and Readers' Digest, and solicit further commentary from JK himself? It's harmless, it's innocuous, and it might be fun to watch this golden stream of misinformation become the current 'wisdom' about the 'infobahn'.
The thought of virtual continents never entered my mind while standing in line at the card reader with a stack of cards that represented lines of fortran. Networking in that era involved talking to the next person in line about critical issues such as whether or not the cat messed up our card order.
At a frantic pace, the computing climate has changed from utilitarian convenience to indespensible communication. No one predicted the vast use this net of cyber information and communication would produce. It became a living entity, with many diverse ideas about where it should head.
Those of us who have taken the wild ride from its humble beginnings are in awe of its reality and potential. I therefore propose a separate universe for we old geezers who have seen this develop in spite of ourselves.
I think that the 'net still has too much overlap in many areas and sites to be considered seperating into contenents. Sure, there is a little bit of contenental drift, and the extremes of any end do seem completely seperate--but I think that those are the exeption.
"And you, ma'am, are ugly. But in the morning, I will be sober" --Winston Churchill
Although I think that in general the idea is an interesting and handy one, one problem I see in it is the fact that a lot of the "buynet" and "corporatenet" sites are intended to be complete standalones, so as to keep all the business to themselves (this excludes advertising). They all have similar themes and motives, but can they really be called a net if they interconnect as little as possible?
This month's ASAP (attached to Forbes - yes, I hate their politics but I read the mag anyway) posits that the Internet bubble is about to burst, primarily becauase they see the "revolution" following the same path as other technologies have.
Maybe they are right, but I think that their analogies to railroads, telephones and the like don't necessarily model what's happening here. They forecast a great period of consolidation, where all the little RR companies get swept up into the few surviving giants or just get pushed under.
But I'm not sure the Internet has to follow that model at all. Small sites, even teeny-weeny sites, can compete with the giants. Sure there will be failures and shakeouts, and the big dogs will get more and more powerful, but little guys can still come in and carve out a territory for themselves.
I don't think people of the Forbes mindset really comprehend any of this.
-- Tony Lawrence
CrapNet