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:
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.
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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).
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.)
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.
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 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
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.
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
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...
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..
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>
X-Net (sex and dark and forbidden pleasures) Shouldn't that be XXX-Net and not the wonderous ISP?
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.
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...
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.
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
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?
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.
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!
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 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
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), 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
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?
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
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.
I would guess that in reality many people kind of like the concepts of the internet and of libertarians in general at least for a while. I guess that they are more likely to take risks and develop things that relate to community building and freedom than the average joe. 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. With something like the internet you could just go to some page and learn something that summarized material that could take week to wade through on your own.
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
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.
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.
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... :)
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
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.
In writing especially "modern" writing there is a type of writing called stream of conciousness writing. Usually this is seen in poetry or short monologes or perhaps in Absurdist drama
Stream of consciousness is also seen in novels. For example, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is a novel written entirely in stream of consciousness. The book actually contains a series of streams since it tends to jump at random from one character's head to another.
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
I'd rather be lucky than good.