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)

Please feel free to add your own.

Discuss among yourselves:

Comments

This reminds me

[jd]

A while back, I tried to think of an alternative numbering scheme for books. The existing system didn't seem particularly logical or intuitive. So, I started off by plotting books on a set of axis. The "number" would then be where the book would be, in this N-dimensional space. (In the "final revision", I ended up with 12 dimensions for Book Space.)

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.

GovNet, MilNet

[Poe]

There is a huge ammount of information being passed around on the internet these days for Government and Military purposes.
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 .gov .com .edu)
It would greatly serve the internet, IMHO, to have domain classes for each of these "continents". (.sex .tec .alt)
This is what DNS was designed for, and it's sad to see this feature go unused.

It Occurs to Me...

[Spud Zeppelin]

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.

Pigeonholing (and too many questions)

[drox]

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...

Personal homepages

[harmonica]

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...

Actually, don't look at content; look at people.

[w3woody]

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:

• People trying to get rich
• People who are trying to convert us
  
• People who are having fun
• People who are trying to express themselves

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

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I'd call this "entering the third era", not second

[LinuxParanoid]

You didn't define what you meant by "entering the second Internet era", but I'd say we're entering the third Internet era, not the second. The three eras I see would be:

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

Gore-Net?

[Dharzhak]

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.