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.

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