Stu News and Photos

I get most of my daily intelligence briefings from the internet (including, but not limited to, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, Fox News (gotta see what the other side's up to), The Jerusalem Post, CNN, The Daily Breeze (the paper that covers our local neighborhoods), The Guardian (UK), and others)... In addition to straight news, I also read a few tech-oriented websites, for keeping up with current gadgetry/science. And then there's Boing Boing. Boing Boing is its own entity, a unique gem of a site. In a nutshell, Boing Boing is a blog with four contributors (along with the a fifth guest-host, a position which rotates every few weeks). These folks post a brilliant bricolage of science/pop culture/current events/weirdness that I find highly educational and immensely entertaining. While they are a "blog," they currently average approximately 5 million readers a month. That's unique readers (or individual computer addresses, to put it another way). So I guess it's nice to know I'm not alone. In fact, I know that there are more than one of my fifteen readers who are fans of Boing Boing. For the rest of you, if you haven't yet, take a few moments to peruse their content: Boing Boing

Anyway, what does this have to do with the title of this entry? In the recent past (depending on when you read this, it could have been yesterday or the day before or the day before that) Boing Boing ran a post pointing to a newly-written article about the history and current state of an internet protocol (application) that pre-dates the web, a protocol known as Gopher. For those unfamiliar, Gopher was sort-of like the web without pictures, a text-only listing of a computer's public "stuff." Back in 1993, before the first web browser fell into wide distribution, if you wanted to use the internet to get a file from another computer, your choices were limited to FTP or Gopher. FTP was nice if you knew exactly where you needed to go to find the file you were after, but Gopher was better, because it was searchable in a variety of ways. Unfortunately/fortunately, Gopher went away with the explosive popularity/ease of use of HTML (the code that was used to create the first web pages, a code that is still widely used today) and the free web browser Mosaic (...the Gopher folks also announced that they were going to start charging a fee for its use, which didn't create a lot of love in the burgeoning internet community). In other words, when HTML hit town, anyone with a middle-school diploma could utilize it to set up their own server, easily offering up their "stuff" to an ever-increasing number of novice computer users. Gopher was, in a relative instant, obsolete.

The following years were wonderful, especially for folks like me. I wasn't blessed with a math/engineering brain, yet I was able to teach myself this new way of using the internet. And there were plenty of folks like me out there, computer geeks with both a mild amount of computer programming know-how and an infinite desire to see other people's stuff. The rest of the 90s and the vast part of our current decade were a grand time for me, internet-wise.

But now I've begun to notice that the web has become a bit top-heavy, in that the substance out there is so thickly coated in fancy graphic ornamentation that the internet is, at times, difficult to navigate. The web used to be fairly clean and streamlined. But an over-abundance of graphic designers and an under-abundance of content-makers (a result of our ever-crumbling public education system) have led us to our current environment of almost-incomprehensible web sites. The sites who can afford skilled graphic designers are ok (few are actually lovely), but the vast majority of today's websites are constructed by folks with little or no design education, so the pages are impenetrable, like a dark and dense forest hiding potential treasure. It is this current state that has me misty-eyed for the heady days of the mid-90s, when the internet was uncluttered, sleek, easy to traverse.

My intent is not to complain. I'm impossibly grateful for what I have. The internet, the web is a true garden of delights - everything is out there, no matter where your interests lie. Yet I feel a certain hesitancy when I use today's web, a slight reluctance borne of the knowledge that my internet travels will be a tad more difficult. Not a big thing, but something I felt was worth mentioning.