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

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