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The Simplification of the Web

The web was originally created as a communication interface for universities. It was built to help intellectuals share knowledge, bounce ideas, and collaborate with projects—without ever meeting—thus enabling collective advancements.

Today’s Internet has been greatly simplified; even people with no idea of how it works can use it. Gone are the days of Telnet, gone are the days of text-only browsing and gone are the days of surfing via Mosaic. The next step in the simplification of the web has been directed at publishing. It is now possible to publish books, articles and pictures straight to the Internet, using only a browser (even a mobile phone browser will do). Movable Type, TextPattern and WordPress, have made this possible for a whole range of people; from web designers to writers, all with little or no knowledge of HTML. All that is required—a browser and a password—is readily available and free, usually.

TypePad, AOL Journals ect charge for what they provide: a reliable publishing system, that is completely set-up for the user. Weblogs, Moblogs (abbreviation of “mobile weblog”), etc can be set-up during an afternoon, and before dinner is served you can be publishing to the web. This is a huge move away from the personal web sites of old. As Geocities and Tripod are far more complicated to set-up and use than these new webloging services, I suspect that a flood of personal weblogs will suddenly become available when TypePad and AOL Journals finally get off the mark. This rapid flow of new sites will likely contribute to the Google “blog-noise” phenomenon that has been discussed recently by Matt Haughey and others. Nothing much can be done to stop this, so I am curious as to how Google will cope. For “weblogs as a resource” to be realised Google must be able to cut through the noise of irrelevant data to find what we were looking for. I’m sure it will soon be apparent if that’s possible.

Comments (Add yours)

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  1. tomjleeds says:

    Well, don’t forget that it dates back to the cold war (or at least the Internet does); ARPAnet etc.

  2. zlog says:

    The Web and the Internet are two different things according to the guy that invented it.

    See http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#Internet

  3. tomjleeds says:

    OK, you got me I wasn’t sure whether you were being specific or not.

    One idea for the design, it might be a good idea to have a post-title at the top of the post, along with the time of posting etc. At the moment it’s hard to see where one post ends and the next begins. It could also be perceived that the homepage is static rather than being a blog.

    Oh and; “All markup will be striped from your comment”. Stripped has two Ps.

  4. johnzeratsky.com says:

    I very much like the way your blog is designed, actually. I’ve never liked being distrupted by big date seperators while reading. It all flows nicely this way.

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