How the Mighty have Fallen...

Back in the days of yore, when I started playing with the www - (92?) CERN had a web-page with links to all web-servers on the world. There were thirteen.

It was fun to browse the web, not just a tiny portion of the web. There was a time when, I am fairly certain, I knew the majority of publicly accessible web-pages on the world.

For days, sometimes weeks, there was nothing new on the www. No new servers, no new pages. I had my book-marks (we called them "Hotlist" back then) and at some point thought it might be a neato idea to have a page of my own. I gleaned some HTML here and there and wrote a flashy successor to my hotlist.

That's how all this started.

It was not only possible to be on top of things, to know every link on the planet that had something to do with a certain topic and to collect them all - it was fun, and a bit of a challenge.

I was aware, that the world was looking into my files, and so I tried to be witty and thoughtful. I tried to write a few words about the links that I had since, quite frankly, anybody can put up a page with just links.

It was a delight to "browse", since only people in pretty high positions in academia had access to the web - it originated from high-energy physics, after all, and those who put a page up to be seen by the world usually had actually something to say - and frequently it was something worth reading.

The web was content-driven: The content was already there, and the www only provided a new way of communicating it.

Men were real men, women were real women and little furry animals from Alpha Centauri were real little furry animals from Alpha Centauri.

Nowadays, though...

Fifty percent of the www have turned into commercial spammage. I say "spammage", since there is no content provided - those pages are supposed to look spiffy, but they don't give you anything you couldn't get just as easily (or even more easily) in some other way.

The web became presentation-driven: It was more important for company X to "have a web-presence", to bring some crud online that looked polished and high-tech, than to actually have something to say. What good is an online-catalog, if you can't shop online? If your online-catalog only gives me the exact same identical information that I can find in the printed version, I'd rather shop with the printed catalog, that I can put on my knees, mark in it with a felt-tip pen, dog-ear, scribble notes on the borders.

The majority of the rest of the web seems to be nerds that feel immensely smug for putting up some pictures of naked people somewhere and who seem to want to make money from selling you access (for only $19.95 per month) to some grainy, badly-scanned nudity, that you can buy for $5 at the next newsstand. And you don't even need a thousands-of-dollars worth of hardware to look at it. And it doesn't even matter if it gets wet.

Then there are the millions and millions of stupid little kids (of all ages) who revel in the ability to put a page on the web. "Hey, look at me - I have a web-page". Not that they have anything to say - mind you. The total text-content of these pages is approximately twenty words. Plus a picture of the family dog. Plus, in extreme situations, some kind of logo. "C00Ld00dz R00l". Bleah.

Well - it's been a fun time, but the WWW is dead. You heard it here first. Commercialism has killed a wonderful idea, ignorance and apathy have buried it. As usual.

Men are Nerds that are too stupid to hack a couple lines of HTML and need a "web-publisher" program to present a link-grave without reference, without explanation, without ideas.

Women are brainless morons who are unable to use the scroll bar on their browser and actually click on the "back to top" link at the bottom of the page.

And little furry animals from Alpha Centauri are advertised either as "hot chiXXX" or as "health-food" on a billion of pages of useless network-cloggage.

"Have you ever done something actually useful on the WWW?" -- "You won't, and the company that will make it impossible is ..." well, there's quite a number, really.

The internet is full.

Go home!