Saturday 26th November 2023
Topics:
- I am back!
- It may be sentimentality, but I really miss the old days of the internet.
- I remember using it for the first time in a public library on a 56k modem, on a PC that you had to book in advance.
- There was an excitement about it, it was new and unexplored.
- Bandwidth was such an issue, online video was practically non-existent, while images loading in via progressive scans, initially as low-resolution images that gradually became clear over several seconds.
- Social media did not exist.
- Search engines had no ads.
- There were no pop-ups for accepting cookies or signing up to newsletters.
- Instead, we had personal home pages with page counters, blink tags, and scrolling marquees, and web rings...
- E-commerce did not exist, I can clearly remember when people we paranoid about sharing their credit card details online with anyone for fear of being ripped off.
- They had to be educated to "look out for the lock" for SSL-enabled websites before sharing their credit card details.
- To think there is a whole generation of Zoomers who never experienced the naive joy and freedom of Web 1.0.
- Do we need a Neo Web 1.0, a return to the old?
- There was an attempt to do something similar a few years, back, when Geocities relaunched as Neocities: "Neocities is a social network of 685,600 web sites that are bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web." - https://neocities.org/
- I love projects like Neocities, and launched Greppr for similar reasons.
- As a technologist, I will never advocate for a return to the past, but in the shift to the commercial platform dominated internet we have today, we have really lost that free spirit of discovery and hacker ethos.
- An internet of builders and hackers is far more interesting that an internet of consumers.
- We have arrived at the wrong destination.
- What I am working on this week:
- Greppr.org - Now at 2.8m web pages indexed.
- Media I am enjoying this week:
- For All Mankind.
- Cyberpunk 2077.
Download
File details: 17.7 MB MP3, 12 mins 17 secs duration.
Title music is "Come 2gether" by Ooyy, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com
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