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The Rise of the Junkweb and Why It's So Awesome
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Have you noticed your Facebook stream or looked at reddit lately? A huge chunk of what goes by lately are photos with text over them, usually quotes about this or that. 'It's the Junkweb,' writes Chris Brogan. 'Why "junk?" Because the original intent of the Internet was that links were gold, that searchability was key, that this ability to find anything and use resources from wherever was magic. And this new web? The web of pictures with text over them? They're junk. They're a dead end. The picture is the payload.' Facebook and Pinterest are doing what so much of our 'awesome' tech hasn't been able to do well: let the everyperson into this universe. For whatever reason, the 'photos with text' experience gives us that feeling we get when we read magazines. 'It makes the texty text of blogging a lot less stark. It draws our eyes in. It's fast to consume, and it brings an emotional response faster.' Now with the release of Google's Panda search technology, it has been acknowledged that links and pages aren't everything and with Google+ goes the realization that it's no longer a links-only world. who shares is as important as how it's shared. 'I'm spending far more time on the Junkweb than I am on the Smartweb,' concludes Brogan. 'Deny it, if you want. The numbers show otherwise. We are in love with this new method of interacting.'"
when it's actually funny. I don't have a problem with the medium per se, but content is usually horrendous. Maybe 5% of the time is either stunning or hilarious, but the other 95% is just trash :(
1990's people used to email this crap to each other. stupid pictures and the dumb dancing baby animation
with the rise of facebook and other social networking people share this crap and its more viral. and the sites that carry it found a way to monetize on the junk
Wikipedia is the #6 most visited website on the internet, and is a textbook example of hypertext: it's mainly text, with some illustrations, intended to be informative, with an emphasis on making the documents hyperlinked and searchable.
I will admit that the idea's been losing some traction outside of Wikipedia, but partly because many people have started pooling their efforts there. Ten years ago I ran websites with information on subjects of interest to me. But today I just edit Wikipedia articles. There's little reason for me to create Trepidity's Ancient Greek Temples Homepage when there's no way it could ever compete with the information Wikipedia already has on them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I am far more concerned about the proliferation of endless pages that are designed only to echo content to gain page rank for some pointless website I have little interest in, or to garner the display of as many ads as possible. Often I will be reading something that I find interesting but when I follow a link in the text - or in the sidebar - I get a page that is an aggregate of pointless links (but has ads) and if I try to click on the link to the original thing that interested me, I get yet another page and so on and so on. There is a massive amount of this dreck out there on the web, and I think its sole purpose is to gain pagerank mostly.
When the internet was academic primarily, there was not much data but it was perhaps a bit more informative, now that we have the commercial internet the bulk of the it seems to be almost devoid of purpose and content.
The LOLCat meme and others like it - endless motivational posters etc - is at least created by someone who thought it was funny and hoped to create a meme that lasts. Its tiring and its jumped the shark IMHO but its far preferable to webpages without meaning or purpose.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
The article isn't important or even insightful. It's another lament about people using the internet in "non-approved" ways. Today's villain is the lolcat, apparently. It used to be people tweeting about what the dog is doing, or posting family pictures online, or blogging about what one had for dinner, or mailing each other jokes, or top-posting on Usenet, or whatever. It's all "junk" and yes, a lot of people are doing it. And in the mean time the rest of the Internet is moving along just fine. Nothing to see here, move along.
What a surprise: technology that enables us to create and enjoy wondrous works of art can and will also be used to produce lowest common denominator crap. Hell, even Gutenberg's printing press wasn't used at first to print new works, or even to make existing works (like the bible) available to the masses. It was used to mass-produce indulgences for the church to sell to sinners; the clergy couldn't hand-write the things fast enough to meet demand.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Horse shit. I was around at the time. It was geeks.
They first started it all with overlaid ASCII characters making The Mona Lisa, Statue of Liberty, etc. Oh yes, and porn.
Then, when they got their hands on graphic software, they did it with pics and text.
Every example of the presence of bad/crappy/funny/intelligent/etc..... can be traced back to a geek doing it. That group has the same humorous and degenerate proclivities and impulses as everyone else and they had the first access.
By the way, don't use "unwashed masses" in the future. It's a red flag.
Horseshit.
Almost all of that ASCII art was done decades before by the RTTY radio geeks, and most of the best stuff was porn.
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So yes, it can be traced back to geeks, but a lot further back than you seem to know about, you young whipper-snapper.