Slashdot Mirror
The Web We Have To Save
An anonymous reader writes: Hossein Derakhshan endured a six-year prison term in Iran for doing something most of us would take for granted: running a blog. He has a unique perspective — he was heavily involved in internet culture, becoming known as Iran's "blogfather," before suddenly being completely shut off from the online world in 2008. Seven months ago, he was released. When he got settled, he took up his old work of blogging, but was surprised by how much the web has changed in just a few years. Now he decries our reliance on monolithic social streams that prioritize image and meme sharing over the thing that makes the web the web: links.
"The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web—a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization—all the links, lines and hierarchies—and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you'd rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. ... Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete."
"The hyperlink represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web—a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralization—all the links, lines and hierarchies—and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Blogs gave form to that spirit of decentralization: They were windows into lives you'd rarely know much about; bridges that connected different lives to each other and thereby changed them. ... Since I got out of jail, though, I've realized how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete."
I particularly like those tweets when I'm not even doing laundry that day!
Real estate is a fantastically particular business. I would like to meet the person that wants to drown in every tweet from just one realtor or one agency.
When I've looked for a home, the realtor and I were busy defining exactly what we were looking for. In short order we had a short list. We checked out that list. If that didn't work out, we re-defined and repeated.
The process had absolutely nothing to do with breathlessly tweeting out every gasp in the real estate market and everything to do with being specific.
FWIW, this sounds like it might be a job for RSS or email...but the notion of having to sort through tweets is ridiculous. Another problem with tweets is you would have to follow the link to learn anything at all -- there would be no room to describe the listing (unlike in RSS or email).
I come here for the love
"The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking." https://medium.com/matter/the-...
Sad but true.
Immediately following the end of the article, I found this:
[infinite facepalm]
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The internet has become all of the things that the old AOL represented.
He is bitching because the medium he used to become popular is now obsolete for the masses. It is no different than newspapers complaining about the internet or "journalists" complaining about bloggers. Now its bloggers complaining about average Joe's. Unfortunately as the ability to publish moved down the food chain anyone with a computer is "publishing". Now we get a huge volume of useless content drowning out anything of value.
The fact is the same people publishing cat pictures and dumbed down quotes would never read a meaningful article anyway. They have just joined the internet and now outnumber the people who actually want to generate and consume meaningful content. Welcome to real life.
Corporate content aggregation, and new flocks of sheep to drink from those content streams are one phenomenon.
"Entrepreneurs" re-inventing IRC every two weeks with more emoticons is another. Can we simplify every "internet innovation" into three bullets?
1) threaded forums -> TCP -> Usenet -> every news service ever (time-buffered data delivery)
2) "get hails" -> UDP -> IRC -> every chat service ever (real-time data delivery)
3) hypertext -> HyperCard -> WWW -> links (glue that connects everything)
And I'll argue "content aggregation" is just a fancy .* glob, so pre-net.