The Nine Continents of the Internet 402
Here's a Valentine's Day gift to you all (smooch!), my shortest column ever: As the Internet enters its second era, it appears to be evolving into a series of distinctly separate, different continents and sub-continents. (Continued below)
Here are my names for the nine continents of the Internet Planet. They speak for themselves:
- The Corporate Internet (the dot.coms, portals, big ISPs, e-traders)
- The Undernet (subterranean but thriving mailing lists, Usenet groups, messaging systems, Weblogs)
- TechNet (geeks, nerds, scientists and researchers, sites like this one, c.net
- X-Net (sex and dark and forbidden pleasures)
- InfoNet (news and information)
- BuyNet (auctions, products, retailing services)
- CultureNet (salon.com, movies, TV, pop culture, MP3s, DVDs)
- GameNet (the rich, complex and rapidly growing world of gaming)
- GodNet (the much overlooked but vast hive of spiritual and religous sites and lists)
Discuss among yourselves:
Networks/Continents? (Score:1)
These "Continents" often end up linking to one another - porn and dotcom, say, infonet and corporate. Undernet and porn. The possibility and peril of the online world is that these things can now get in the ring together, that there is no longer any "sacred space." The Undernet meets the Corporate Net through Third Voice and similar products. The old cultural boundaries between content and individuals are blurred.
A more useful Network ontology would be to examine how individuals
Argh.
Katz is onto something. (Score:1)
Magazines are even more segmented, maybe just because they've been around longer. Ditto for books, movies, any other media.
Last week, the Commerce Internet came under attack. The US government will now use this as a reason to crack down on the Underground Internet. That's why these categories are important: because people who make political decisions have experience with only a few segments of the Internet smorgasbord.
Underground? (Score:1)
Hell what about MP3-ers? Every type of person there is is into mp3s...
That's my $.02.
Re:Nice, but kinda incorrect (Score:1)
Just because some ignorant site like Slashdot gets a few hundred thousand visitors who mostly believe that "Windows has lost" (which, btw, it hasn't - and also, the number of the people that believe this is probably just a really vocal four digit amount) doesn't mean the 259 million users online agree.
And need I go into how Microsoft's former CEO has 90 billion dollars, and you don't?
Keep in mind that he got that rather quickly. Linux has had its chance. It still has one. Kind of. It's a great idea, but here's what corporations have over open source freelancers:
Knowledge of how the world works.
Code hackers like those who build Linux believe that Linux is, without a doubt in the world, absolutely perfect. This causes many problems. For one, your OS is going to suck with time. For two, you look like morons (and are?). For three, no OS is perfect. But every other comment on Slashdot is about how Windows sucks because they can't figure out how to configure it right and how a Windows system had some problem so it must b Windows' fault. Of course, when something running Linux crashes, it's most definitely just a Microsoft employee trying to figure out how to run Linux - because Linux can't crash! It's perfect!
Well, folks. Keep bitching about how Bill Gates sucks and how "M$" blows. But just remember: You're not the one with 90 billion dollars.
(BTW, I'm posting as an AC because, while this is offtopic, I know that it's a disagreement so it'll be moderated to "Troll." I also realize my post contained two sentences that could be considered unnecessarily offensive, however there's two things to note here:
1) I'd be marked down anyway
and
2) That doesn't seem to keep "Linux rocks" posts from getting a 5, "Interesting").
Re:Better in what way? (Score:1)
So we can say that the Inquisitors and Conquistadores weren't true Christians, and that the USSR and China weren't truly Communist. And where does that get us?
In both cases at least some of people that you mentioned adhered to their doctrines and therefore were true Christians or Communists. I won't comment on the first, however in the second case goals and means are turned upside down by anti-communist propaganda -- socialist states were the means, choosen by communists (to be exact, some of communists) to achieve their goal in the future, yet I have yet to find an American who is not convinced that USSR is a completed implementation of Communism doctrine.
Labels are slippery things. Though two things that can be inferred: states which call themselves Communist
No country ever called itself Communist -- communist doctrine doesn't even have a definition of "communist country". Those countries called themselves Socialist, and it is even prominently placed in most of their full names. Dominant (or the only) political party in those countries was Communist, yet country never was claimed to be an implementation of Communism.
are likely to be horrendously oppressive, and organised religion is a tempting justification for all manner of atrocity.
In my personal experience oppression in capitalist country (US) is at the same order of magnitude as in socialist one (USSR), just means and directions of oppression differ -- in socialist countries government is corrupt by its own means, and oppresses everyone, while in capitalist countries big business corrupts government and oppresses the population with the help of the corrupt government. I admit that countries in the state of political/economical disorder (current Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) are much worse than both systems in their stable state, however I hardly can see it as a valid excuse.
Re:FreeNet (Score:2)
You can't exactly think that communists would want say their political beliefs being challenged would you? I can't say that you would. This is bad for keeping control.
All political movements are bad at handling open discussions of their doctrines -- one thing is preaching to the converted and booing at small number of opponents in presence of huge crowd of supporters, and another one is a discussion where both supporters and opponents have comparable opportunity to explain their views and challenge each other. Actually I have seen communists defending their views in open discussion with stronger arguments and in much more intelligent manner than libertarians ever did when placed in unfriendly environment.
Re:Better in what way? (Score:2)
How is communism a better system? It doesn't solve the problem of allocation of scarce resources as well as a decentralised system would, and then there's the small matter of it breaking down if central control is subverted (which means that all attempts to realise it require totalitarian authority).
I have never said that communism is a better system (previous poster said it, not me), but communism's main idea is that resources don't have to be scarce -- by communists' theory improvements in technology and society can cause abundance of all kinds of resources, and only greed can prevent people from using such resources responsibly, thus causing artificial scarcity for much longer time than it would be "natural". Therefore they claim that before abundance will be actually achieved people should become "better", more responsible and cooperative and less driven by primitive search of wealth and power (then in the case of true abundance people would feel guilty or even can become too bored if they would become worse slackers than the level where society sustains the abundance).
Countries that west called "communist" never claimed to achieve "communism" -- they called themselves "socialist" countries, and centralized control of the economy was claimed to be necessary only in socialist but not communist society. Communist governments of socialist countries were supposed to achieve the goal of building and advancing society that consists of those more responsible/cooperative people until the advancement of society will produce both abundant resources and responsible enough population to handle the abundance in the way that will allow true "comminism" to be self-supporting.
If by "better" you mean nicer in an abstract, non-practical sense, that could be argued. But an even nicer system would be for everybody to have as much of everything they want. It looks quite peachy, unless you actually try to implement it.
I agree with that. One can doubt that their goal was practical or achievable, and one can certainly point out that the way, "socialism" was implemented created totalitarian and corrupt governments. However they definitely weren't the first political movement facing this problem. Christian religion also taught that only development of virtues (whatever "virtues" are) can improve the life of people, and the same Christian religion caused quite a lot of violations of personal freedom, produced corrupt hierarchy of organized religion that supported the worst governments of the world, etc. Dominant ideologies of "capitalism", while probably being the most stable currently, have shown that they are, too, capable of producing social structures and political mechanisms that defeat their original purpose, reduce personal freedom, give people disincentive for productive work, and I believe that libertarian ideas, if implemented, will not be immune to this disease either (IMHO they are actually more vulnerable -- libertarians, even more than communists, ignore the fact that society always has forces that destabilize it, and even though stability is desirable for most of society members, without a mechanism that supports such a stability it can be easily turned into something that has a stabilizing mechanism -- anything between feudalism, military rule and current form of capitalism, dominated by few players with blatantly anti-consumer policy).
Communism may be a disagreeable philosophy, and it produced a large amount of grief and suffering, however your criticism of it shows that you are attacking some imaginary view of "communism", established by anti-communist propaganda, not the real thing. Any intelligent supporter of communism would point it out, and it probably would be a tough argument for "rah-rah, communism is bad" crowd.
ROTFL (Score:2)
Two issues:
One, I think that perhaps a "Cause Zealot" continent is in order. Consider how the internet serves as a connecting point for scattered populations with similar ideas. I just saw a piece last night about how McCain is doing his recruiting for volunteers almost exclusively on the net and using the net to organize them. Of course, then there are the usual suspects as well: Linux zealots, Mac evangelists, Amiga people, God-Hates-Fags morons, People for the Privitization of Sidewalks, etc.
Second, I think the "Corporate" and "Buy" areas should be merged as concepts and then subdivided into two catagories: Brochure sites and Useful Sites (where you can buy stuff, get research, insurance quotes or whatever). After all, corporations are at their heart and soul all trying to sell you something.
As for the general nature of the article, it's good food for thought and I didn't have to take a bathroom break in the middle of reading it. Bravo, Jon.
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Re:Not very distinct (Score:2)
For the "corporate" sites, I'm thinking more along the lines of those fun brochure sites you get when you go to any major corporate site. Slashdot doesn't show off VA's product line or explain VA's corporate philosophy, and I have yet to see the VA "Vision Statement" on the /. front page.
Try this one out: FinanceNet. This continent would consist of the stock trading sites and message boards (etrade, fool.com, etc.) There might be less of these than others, but I'll bet they're some of the more popular destinations on the net (for some reason, I'm not supposed to surt /. from the office, but updating my stocks every 15 minutes is A-OK with management).
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EGO-net (Score:1)
Book Space (Score:1)
No Oceans (Score:2)
Overlap (Score:1)
Good break down, though. Diagramatically, I would see fuzzy boarders between some of these continents, and some being sub-continents of others (BuyNet being encapsulated withing the CorporateNet).
T.
Re:Personal homepages (Score:1)
Probably should be a little small continent somewhere out in the middle of the ocean...
Jon, continent number 10 has just been found, orbitted in the other direction, as if captured by... oh, er. Sorry. Hmmm.
T.
Re:Content Areas (Score:2)
... you'll note that every music shop in the world attempts to categorise CDs by genre, but nobody's every done a perfect job of it.
Come to think of it, Yahoo and dmoz both try and categorise websites, and they've got a lot more than nine root hierarchies...
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Re: This reminds me (Score:2)
This reminds me (Score:4)
I defined any "congregation" of a large number of points as a "City", and smaller clusters as "Towns" and "Villages".
After a while, I realised that books weren't always absolutely uniformly consistant, from beginning to end. That they actually moved through Book Space, rather than occupying a point.
Using the metaphore above, some books could be described as "local inhabitants" (if they stayed within the limits of their city, town or village), "traders" (if they moved from one populated area to another), and "explorers" (if they ventured into otherwise empty regions).
A book, then, could be described by the journey through Book Space, from start to finish. This would not be a single number, but rather two numbers and a path. This would make it very complicated to write on the covers of books. :) On the other hand, seeing that path through Book Space would tell you more about the contents than the existing number ever would.
How does this apply to the Internet? I'd like to expand my concept of Book Space to cover all the content of the Internet. Instead of these 9 or so "Continents", I'd like to suggest that any Internet site or file also exists as an inhabitant of Book Space (which I guess I'll need to rename). Each physical site, virtual site, collection of pages/files, individual file will all have an identifiable path through Book Space.
Does this help any? Well, yes it does. You can define "similar content" in terms of a point and a maximum radius, depending on how similar you want. Anything inside that hyper-sphere is "similar" within the parameters you've defined.
How else does it help? Well, if any "continent" really exists on the Internet, it'll show up in Book Space. You'll be able to "see" a very sharp, distinct border, for a start. In the same way that very few towns can be found off the coast of Australia, you'll see very little in the way of habitation beyond such borders, except where two continents merge.
This is VERY distinct from unexplored territory within a country, as I've envisaged it. Such territory would be encapsulated, the way the deserts are encapsulated by the population.
I also think it's a more useful image, as it implies commerce and traffic between the different settled regions, allowing for a free exchange of ideas and growth. (It also allows for wars and conflict, but you can't have everything.) The image of isolated continents makes any exchange implicitly difficult, as you're conveying the impression vast distances, over difficult terrain (such as an ocean). I'd rather have an Internet where there was greater co-operation, closeness and contact.
BBS's (Score:1)
Don't forget the thriving BBS culture. Telnet BBS's are thriving these days on the net, you thought the internet snuffed us out! Ha... we're still here in full ANSI colour!
For more info, check here:
http://www.darktech.org [darktech.org]- Xabbu
Continents Colliding (Score:2)
The fact is that this whole thing isn't Internet-specific. The same idea can be applied to any culture at any time. We may have a few new continents here and there (TechNet?), but you can always apply whatever vague analogy to culture and have it make sense. It's like a horoscope in that sense, and it's worth about the same, too.
Welcome to Pangea (Score:2)
It is not difficult to imagine a rapidly growing "grass roots site", utilizing and propounding the usage of the latest technologies, arguing the sociopolitical gains of widespread distribution of stigma-free demand-met service. For a limited fee, legitimacy, superior service, or just plain recognition would be proferred upon the customer; the Decision Solution would be borne out tight integration between the objective fact, the groupthink bandwagon, and the means to complete the solving transaction. It'd be fun. It'd be sexy. It'd be commerce as God Himself must have intended it--it'd be huge.
And hungry...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Re:Welcome to Pangea (Score:2)
GameNet, TechNet, Undernet, CultureNet, and InfoNet are always linking to eachother. CorpNet usually links to partners, allies, and "unbiased members of InfoNet, although it often owns EveryNet(or, The InterNet!). Lets not get into X-Net and links...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Re:Content Areas (Score:1)
Actually, this is (1) false, and (2) beside the point.
(1) Consider that India is considered a part of Asia, despite being on a different tectonic plate. Australia is not considered to be on the same contintent as India, despite the fact that they are on the same plate. Whether something is part of one continent or another has nothing at all whatsoever to do with plate tectonics.
(2) Consider that the world was divided into the continents we know today hundreds of years before we discovered plate tectonics. Even if it were true that we had coincidentally managed to divide the world into continents such that it satisfied your definition, your
So while Africa is attached to Asia, it is a separate continent.
By your definition, Africa isn't really attached to Asia. In order to walk from the African plate to the Eurasian plate, you'd need to walk across the Arabian plate, which lies between them (and should be a seperate continent by your definition). Although this plates do touch, under the Mediterranean.
When continents and tectonic plates agree, it's only by historical accident. In no way does plate tectonics play a role in the definition of what is or isn't a continent.
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Re:Nice idea, wrong categories (Score:1)
This makes sense if you're trying to create a portal site for finding information. It makes no sense if you're trying to divide the net into continents. What made Europe and Asia seperate continents has nothing to do with seperation of land mass (which it isn't) but with the seperation of the people. Likewise with the other continents (the fact that a large expanse of ocean between them explains why the social seperation existed, but it's the societal seperation, not the physical seperation, that defines continents).
The most logical way to divide the Internet into continents would be to study which sites are visited by which people. I think you'll find if you do that the Internet does divide into continents nicely, and more or less along the lines that Katz suggests (although I think it's just a rough sketch, don't take it too seriosly).
Please note that the type of content a site has, or who owns it, etc, is irrelevant to this sort of classification. Neither TLDs nor content are at all meaningful in determining which continent any particular site falls on.
Also note that just like real life, continents do not prevent people from interactings with people from other continents, or being a part of communities on different ones. The fact that people can be a part of multiple communities, or that links can be made between different places, or that some sites are hard to classify into one of these categories, in no way invalidates or even detracts from this style of classification.
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Better in what way? (Score:2)
If by "better" you mean nicer in an abstract, non-practical sense, that could be argued. But an even nicer system would be for everybody to have as much of everything they want. It looks quite peachy, unless you actually try to implement it.
Libertarians and scifi (Score:2)
Half-baked articles (Score:2)
And his previous, longer articles aren't much better. In general they consist of a rehashing of stories from two days earlier, with a modicum of facile "analysis", pompously restating the bleeding obvious from the mantle of journalistic authority.
Re:Better in what way? (Score:2)
Labels are slippery things. Though two things that can be inferred: states which call themselves Communist are likely to be horrendously oppressive, and organised religion is a tempting justification for all manner of atrocity.
Or, in the words of William S. Burroughs, "if you're doing business with a religious sonofabitch, get it in writing. His word isn't worth shit, not with the good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal."
And? (Score:1)
Re:I'd call this "entering the third era", not sec (Score:1)
KatzNet (Score:1)
Re:Content Areas (Score:1)
Every year a new manager would take over the record store (remember records? =) just off the UMCP campus. Every year, I'd have to spend a week figuring out if my favourite bands were filed under Heavy Metal, Hard Rock, Rock & Pop, etc. or on the other side of my musical tastes, Rap, R & B, Sould, etc.
I always believed that when *I* owned a record store there would be two sections: Single Artist, and Multiple Artist. Single Artist alphabetically by Artist, Multiple Artist aphabetically by Compilation Title. Color code the spines by genres, if you want people to be able to browse by such, but if you intend to split the hairs of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, give me a freakin' map!
Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You (Score:1)
I love you man!
But i know i can't have your bud light
That was the bestest valentine's day present ever
SARCASM ALERT OFF
Seriously though, it's an intresting concept but in my opinon the 'net is just
Perception is pigeonholing (Score:1)
Your approach of a series of scales for each feature (eg: moneymaking, preaching, having fun, self expession, informing) seems optimal to me.
Re:Content Areas (Score:1)
Or perhaps you are into information that is useful to people in military service. These sites are all linked together, so if your initial page was www.usaf.gov, for instance, one might feel that the whole net is about govermnent business.
Of course, there are sites that rise above these at a meta-level. These are the search engines, etc. The portals are often the gateways to the various subcultures on the web.
A fun way to randomly find new subcultures is to play a game i made up one day while bored.. The object is to find, using a search engine (any one will do) a single-word search string which returns exactly one link. The pages you find during this quest can be rather diverse..
-bob
Re:AudioNet (Score:1)
It's all the same ugly net (Score:1)
"My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone connected to it to hell." - - Igor Stravinsky
10th Condiment (Score:1)
- Redundant Net (the storage and discussion of all a priori knowlege)
Happy Birthday to ME!What about the originals: .edu, .mil, .arpa? (Score:1)
.mil
.edu
.gov
Remeber what the Internet was originally built for. You're probably right with the other nine, but a lot of people get government information (especially IRS forms and the like) from the 'net. The Military is still there, although not as big as it once was, and so are the universities, and all their researchers, and all the companies (like the one I work for) that support those researchers.
I think it's telling that the Internet has so turned from what people thought it was in the 80's and before (for those who knew about it at all) to what people think it is today, to the point where 'pr0n' is a bigger division than the military!
Anyway, good article. Keep it up.
Re:Wasssup? (Score:1)
Vanity Net and Uselessness Net (Score:1)
Definitely agree that I missed these two..These posts are great..Remember, I never claimed to name them all..Just get the conversation started..Be interesting to see what we end up with at the end of the day..
Re:No Oceans?????? (Score:1)
Re:I'd call this "entering the third era", not sec (Score:2)
In summary, ya got the ages right... but this isn't yet the dawning of the third age of mankind, our last best hope for the . . . wait a minute . . . wrong group. . . . <*>
Re:GovNet, MilNet (Score:2)
More like regions. (Score:1)
Which isn't to say that most sites don't tend towards being just one category. But many don't. Continents seems to imply large gaps between types that are relatively difficult to cross, which doesn't fit the ease with which you can expand an internet site to encompass extra areas. Of course, this isn't always done well.
The above seems a little web centric to me, which is not what I intend. "site" is just a convenient label to attach to a collection of internet services that share a common name. Something like Source Forge seems to embody this to me right now. It's a site that provides a range of Internet services, the most obvious, but not only, or even (depending on your view) most important, being web services.
Colin Scott
Internet and Continents don't go together (Score:1)
There is no need to make divisions into sectors or whatever, the good thing about the Internet is that there are as many divisions as there are users. The experience is personal and unique.
Sites can fall into different 'continents' according to personal taste, what is a game to some is a business to others. And if there would be this strict division there would be a continent where somebody is 'coming from', I am coming from none of these continents.
Re:It Occurs to Me... (Score:2)
Just Nine? (Score:2)
What about the X-Files Continent. Yeap it was pretty shaken down for the last two years. People have lost interest because there were too many "conspiracy-hunters" and snake-oil sellers around. Besides it was well descridited and taken down by some smart fellows around. But it is still alive and it is not just "Entertainment->Paranormalia" as once Yahoo decided to turn it in...
The "national" Continents. Each country possesses a lot of specificities. For example in Russia there is a well set tradition for compromates and flame-wars. In one point the whole Rusweb looks much like the guys of that old Gaul village in the popular French comics "Asterix". Some countries have a too sexist taste on the web. There is sex everywhere, even if you trying to look at the weather in some city. Other are tremendously nationalist. You damn find anything in a common world language
And even if you look ta Katz continents then you will find that things are far from being so simple. One cannot mess Religion and Mysticism in many points. There is Erotics and Pornography and their audiences are frequently far from each other. There is a big gap between Tech & Science and it is a typical mistake of techies to mess both things. And besides he seems to forget the Economist (it is not about commerce!) and Humanitarian groups (History, Psychology, Archeology, Philosophy). I believe they are not so small to be ignored. And I think they should not be simply put inside the Tech Continent.
IRCnet (Score:1)
Re:AudioNet (Score:1)
-David T. C.
Re:you forgot one! (Score:1)
Re:Tectonic plates (Score:1)
I'd guess DVD support in Linux sits on one of these zones, in an area of high geological activity between CorpNet, TechNet & CultureNet :-).
Actually it belongs to X-Net ... "forbidden pleasures". ;-)
Re:anyone else notice? (Score:1)
The classifications don't speak for themselves. (Score:1)
Even with the others, to say they're seperate is a bit odd. What, geeks, gamers, and Jeses-freaks don't buy crap, look at naughty pictures, or work at corporations? I'm sorry, I just don't see this rampant Balkanization this brief article posits.
GovNet, MilNet (Score:3)
Though dwarfed by XNet and CorpNet, this is a signifigant ammount of traffic that doesn't easily fit into your other categories.
You will also notice that some of these categories get their own domain classes. (.mil
It would greatly serve the internet, IMHO, to have domain classes for each of these "continents". (.sex
This is what DNS was designed for, and it's sad to see this feature go unused.
Not continents but strata (Score:2)
I agree with the areas defined, but I see them more as layers. After all, we all have varrying degrees of technical interest (even those without any, who uses the net, have some interest in tech). We all have some sort of a belief system, be it religious or ethical - and even a lack of gnosis is a system of belief.
Each of these strata can be more specifically divided, horizontally this time, so that the Belief Strata would contain not continents and oceans but peaks and valleys. Say you'd have a Catholic peak and a Catholic valley, correspondent to the strength of that belief held by an individual. You would also have a Taoist peak and valley. If you're on one peak, you can not be on another, in a particular strata - since religions, for example, tend to be mutually exclusive in the extreme of subscription (a devout Catholic tends to reject other faiths). But the neat thing is that you can be half-way up two peeks, or complimentary faiths. The valley between some two is not that deep, while between another pair it is abysmal.
We all check up on product info online, and most of us shop here, so the continental divide between the shopping continent and the religious one does not apply (unless your religion forbids online shopping
Commercial and ISP's are also not continents. They were before the net became ubiquitous. Remember how cool it was when Compuserve email could reach Prodigy for the first time. That's when the continents began to sink. A huge percentage of us reach the net via ISP, many via business access and many via
I guess that the membership of the net defies classification, since so many of us share interests of one kind, and are diametrically opposed in others.
Oh, and Jon, I hope that the brevity and 'pro-discussion' angle of your article is caused by lack of time, and not because we finally stuck it to the pachyderm after the interview.
It Occurs to Me... (Score:3)
Since there are search mechanisms (google comes to mind) that are driven by who links to whom, it sounds as if the data exists to define 'net continents ("continets"?) based on interlinking volume. That is, sites among which the volume of hyperlinks is relatively dense would be lumped onto the same "landmass," and any comparatively sparsely linked regions on the graph (this is a !@@#!% big graph!) would be the "oceans" between them.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Speaking of web divisions... (Score:2)
Here's a suggestion (Score:2)
We should reduce the frequency to maybe 3 times a month, tops, and add another writer or two to do the same thing.
What do you all think?
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grappler
Tectonic plates (Score:2)
I'd guess DVD support in Linux sits on one of these zones, in an area of high geological activity between CorpNet, TechNet & CultureNet
On the above premise, one could perhaps visualise X-Net, not as a continental plate, but as a huge oceanic plate, with deep abysses leading down to who knows where...
In addition, there are the many shallow seas of personal internet pages, created just becuase you've been allocated one.
Not very distinct (Score:2)
Re:What IS up with Natalie Portman (Score:2)
Re:13-18 year old "dimwits" (Score:2)
Re:oops! (Score:2)
Pope
"You are correct sir!!"... for now (Score:2)
Pretty good list, John.
Continents are a rather fitting metaphor, since even they aren't static. The tectonic plates shift, meld and sometimes grind against each other - I could wax poetic for quite sometime about these simliarities and what's happening with the "divisions" you described.
Some thoughtless types may think that they can pidgeon-hole people based on what type of sites they frequent, and therefore what "continent" they inhabit, or in a more sinister vein, should inhabit. The only thing is, that we have the capability to hop from "continent" to "continent" with the click of a mouse - we can reside in this world where ever we wish. If we could only transpose that to the non-cyber world - but there's no "Beam me to Punjab, Scotty" yet. *Sigh*.
If we could live anywhere on earth, it's rather obvious that we would get better perspectives on our fellow human beings, and there might be hope for this beautiful place callled Earth. That is the true power of the 'net - our hearts and minds can travel the world, and hopefully make it a better place.
yeah, kinda (Score:2)
As a species, it is very important for us to have a culture, and the culture we have is generally a combination of an initial choice of people or activites we like, followed by a winnowing away of the things which don't seem to fit our choice (even if we rather like them.) It is this tendency which the major corporations rely on in trying to steer the direction of our culture.
John's analysis may be cute and superficial, but some corporate schmuck is making a very similar analysis, and is going to try to turn it into money/mind control for the rest of us
Pigeonholing (and too many questions) (Score:3)
If we must make categories, then rather than continents, with the implication that they're separated by vast distances, I think a better analogy would be a spectrum. The "colors" of the various regions of the net blend into each other.
Perhaps even that is too much pigeonholing. What about the porn sites or the information sites that charge for access or have expensive banner ads to pay the bills? Or the "God" sites that ask the faithful for donations? Some of them take in a lot of money - why aren't they ranked with the big portals and commercial sites? Where is the cutoff? Is it measured in dollars or hits or souls saved? Is there a cutoff at all, or do the types (like the various types of students in a school) blend into one another at the edges? Some may be a blend of more than two types, so a linear continuum is inadequate. A multidimentional continuum might be in order.
Oh well...
Interesting. (Score:2)
Ipv6 will save us anyway..
Self Fulfilling Naming. (Score:2)
Because we just read it, and since most of us hadn't ever tried to classifiy these things, his classification will stick to us, and we as users, and Katz as an author will begin to deal with the net conceptual as though these classifications held.
Which will enforce them.
So by writing this, Katz might have just planted a virulent meme, if it sticks.
On a lighter note: Have any of you seen the window$ based virtual pet games 'Catz' and 'Dogz'? I if 'Katz' is just a test market case for a virtual pundit game.
x-net? (Score:2)
AudioNet (Score:2)
"radio" shows.
In fact, I've started searching for music I want to
listen to, not what the local radio stations want me
to listen to.
Personal homepages (Score:3)
Re:Not very distinct (Score:2)
Very accurate.
Slashdot USED to pay more attention to scientific stuff. These articles didn't generate 786 posts like the "Government Men In Black want to stand over your shoulder while you look at porn" stories.
As far as Linux-hugging, I'll just say this: It used to be I could come to Slashdot to get the whole story. By reading the articles and the posts, I could usually get past sound bites and bias and get some real facts.
Not anymore. Now I look for sites to give me the whole story beyond the "Microsoft sucks. Linux is awesome." stuff I read here.
I use Linux. It doesn't make me cool. It doesn't make me smart. I don't have to pat myself on the back for using it.
Proof that Katz's Analogy Is Invalid (Score:2)
Katz attempted to break down the Internet into "continents". A continent, by definition, is a partition of the set of land mass on a planet. Partitions are disjoint subsets of a set. Disjoint means the intersection of two subsets is the empty set. In other words, a place in Africa cannot be a place in Asia, etc. Katz's "continents" could overlap. Slashdot could belong
to InfoNet AND TechNet. Since there exists an element which belongs to the intersection of two of Katz's "continents", they are not partitions!
There are no special properties of Katz's stupid "continents" that make them worthy of being analogous to actual continents.
I wish there was a friggin' poll that suggested what college courses you'd force Jon Katz to take. I'd vote for Discrete Math.
Re:Here's a suggestion (Score:2)
Agreed wholeheartedly. A diversity of points of view would be healthy, and Slashdot certainly doesn't suffer from a lack of good rant...er...writers. Perhaps one of those spots should be a "guest writer" spot offered from time to time (monthly?) to another essay writer the editors or readers find interesting?
JMR
Actually, don't look at content; look at people. (Score:3)
I tend to think of the Internet as broken up into different regions depending on the primary intent of the people involved. Given that, there seems to be four types:
In the "people trying to get rich" I would place all corporate activitity and many X-rated sites. That's because the thing that motivates them is to make money. Since they are motivated to make money, their activities will eventually devolve into either becomming an "exclusive" hookup (VPNs), advertising like crazy (/.), or sell-sell-sell (Amazon).
In the "people trying to convert us" we have things like the "God" sites, as well as the racist sites.
In the "people having fun" category we have gamers, some technical folks (who apparently have fun writing code, though some of them are more "express yourself types"), and some X-rated sites where some guy with a digital camera is posting nudes of his wife on the 'net.
And in the "people expressing themselves" we have the whole art scene, as well as a lot of GPLed software sites and the like.
I think this is a better way of breaking up the regions of the 'net, partly because by knowing what motivates the people doing the site, you can sort of see in which direction they will "pimp" themselves to achieve their objectives. For example, we have 'www.fresnobee.com', a local newspaper site, with a "shop online" button. That's because the people running the Fresno Bee aren't interested in reporting the news; they're interested in making money reporting the news. And if they can make some additional money allowing people to shop online, why not? They're making money, after all.
Now of course people evolve and change over time, so sometimes these boundaries can be blurred. For example, the husband and wife posting nudes on the 'net for fun may suddenly realize they could make money charging for those pictures. Or the hacker who was having fun tinkering with stuff suddenly finding himself doing it as a form of expression because his 9 to 5 job doesn't allow him the luxury.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Continents (Score:2)
Given the general rule of everything being associative and uncategorizeable, I do see an exception. There are sites developed BY the community, then there are sites developed by entities outside the community which just need a presence. I guess you could call this a split between "commercial" sites and non-commercial sites (even though many commercial sites are part of the "community" and many non-commercial sites aren't).
I would consider places like *news.com and *BUYMYCOOLWIDGET.com in the "external" group. They are places people go, but are not a
It would be cool, though, if the net could be surveyed against several general attributes (say, N), and plotted in N-space. That would be some cool geography.
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla [sourceforge.net]
Re:Really only two... (Score:2)
Which would be the second law, not the first.
Oceans = Continents yet to rise (Score:2)
Some of these are quickly evolving, for example NGO's are somewhat represented by charity sites like The Hunger Site [hungersite.com].
Others may never be represented well simply because technology is against the inherent nature of the offline structure, for example, the Amish. (Though maybe this example is just a lake on the GodNet continent?)
Presumably there are, or will be, fallen continents as part of the oceans. One example I can think of is the NCSA Announcement page, which from the time the web had roughly www servers, until it had about 4000, was probably one of the the most visited websites. It then slowly faded into oblivion, largely replaced by Yahoo, and search engines.
Re:Personal homepages (Score:2)
The exception might be personal pages for college students which have been around since the beginnning of the web (Yahoo started this way). These can be devoted to just about anything, with good percentage of them related to the students studies/major which I don't see as a real part of the Culture.
I'd call this "entering the third era", not second (Score:5)
First era, "Internet for techies", 1969-1993: Internet technology develops, rapidly grows in size as educational network and tech-corporate email gateway, spurred by government research grants and applications like email and USENET
Second era, "Internet for the masses", 1994-today: Internet enters into widespread use by consumers and businesses, spurred by development of the web browser graphical interface
Third era, "Broadband Internet", 1999-tomorrow: cable modem and DSL infrastructures remove bandwidth constraints and enable mass-market content delivery of all media types, spurred by the development of erbium-doped fiber optical amplifiers and dense wave division multiplexing.
--LP
Re:anyone else notice? (Score:2)
Nah. I think, it being Valentines Day and all, that he had a hot date, and was in a hurry to turn this in
The right divisions, the wrong analogy (Score:2)
However, I don't think that the analogy with continents is correct. Perhaps a better analogy would be with either cable channels or with magazines and newspapers. The reason is that we don't have to move physically to change our allegiance from one to another. In fact, we don't have to switch completely, and reallocating our time from one to another is even quicker than dropping one magazine subscription in favor of another. It is as quick as changing channels. And when you channel surf on the net, you never have to miss your favorite show.
Re:Content Areas (Score:2)
Re:Content Areas (Score:2)
Just like you wouldn't go to North America to mine raw diamonds (usually), you wouldn't go to the GeekNet type sites to mine raw international news.
Reunite Gonguanaland! (Score:2)
More parallels to geography? (Score:2)
'In the beginning' we had a "supercontinent", most sites were closely bound, and similar in size. Slowly these drift apart, and smaller "information" masses were formed. This continued slowly until the great explosion (circa. 1994), which has ended up with large different "continents", some more closely bound then others, but still leaving people with the ability to easily travel from "continent" to "continent" with relative ease.
It may be noted that it _is_ possible to be snarled in the geographic complexity of some regions (Pr0n pop-up consoles anyone?), and people still tend to favour one major area over another, while perhaps having a few other "holiday" destinations in other regions.
And I think that's stretching that construct far enough, don't you?
Content Areas (Score:2)
For example that suit and tie lawyer may be a real stif but how do you know when he dosn't get home and say have a real funky time? Same goes with the internet and how you just can't categorize it.
Re:FreeNet (Score:2)
I would guess that in reality many people kind of like the concepts of the internet and of libertarians in general at least for a while. I guess that they are more likely to take risks and develop things that relate to community building and freedom than the average joe. You can't exactly think that communists would want say their political beliefs being challenged would you? I can't say that you would. This is bad for keeping control. With something like the internet you could just go to some page and learn something that summarized material that could take week to wade through on your own.
Re:Content Areas (Score:2)
person Z doesn't eat one type of meat but will eat another type, etc..etc. What else would you call things like dietary or religious preferences if not categories of some form?
I think Katz is right on the money with the trend he's noticed but not for the same reasons he thinks. What we're seeing is nothing more than the Internet reflecting the realities of life and the people living it; to wit- we're seeing the
taming of the net, not by some act (stupid or otherwise) of government, but by the sheer will of the people who live it. Incidentally this is proof that the internet has become an extension to modern life and times, with all the good
and bad these times have to offer.
But the question is do we really want that? I think that for a lot of people they wanted the net to be a utopia form of interaction and change. If we extend the same restrictions to the net that we do to life then the concept of innovation in terms of social arrangements will be utterly doomed.
Categorizing I think dosn't necessarily tame. Usually this is the case if you actually look at any area where one thinks one has tamed something only to see that it is in fact a complex chaos.
I say categorizing sites by category isn't accurate because there is more than one type of content. Slashdot has multiple types of content and missions all in one.
Look at sites of various OSS people. Most are a mixture of technical, social, personal, etc. That is basically what I am driving at.
Internet Communities... (Score:2)
Rather than describe the division by sites, I'd tend to think of it as divided by the people who make up online communities / the types of people who actually use the sites, rather than the sites itself.
Typical Slashdotters associate with the open source / Linux movement. They typically don't hang out at big .com sites and "portal" sites that are taylored for newer users or non-technical users. However, there are clear cases when the use of a technical person and a non-technical person will overlap. In this case, the same site is visited upon by many types of people.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
Re:anyone else notice? (Score:2)
TLD for an individual? and AlterNIC (Score:2)
Also, AlterNIC [alternic.com] has the following domains:
See here [alternic.com] for the list and more info. Also, it is apparently possible to register an entire TLD. (.msft, anyone?)
I noticed, and I know what's to come... (Score:2)
He just wants us to think he's making his stuff shorter. This was just a fake, a feint before the big blow. LOOK OUT.
Re:Content Areas (Score:2)
Actually, that is exactly what it is - accurate. In some form or another, everything *human* is already set into EXACTLY that- categories. Person of colour X is part of religion Y, or person Y doesn't eat meat (vegetarian) whereas person Z doesn't eat one type of meat but will eat another type, etc..etc. What else would you call things like dietary or religious preferences if not categories of some form?
I think Katz is right on the money with the trend he's noticed but not for the same reasons he thinks. What we're seeing is nothing more than the Internet reflecting the realities of life and the people living it; to wit- we're seeing the taming of the net, not by some act (stupid or otherwise) of government, but by the sheer will of the people who live it. Incidentally this is proof that the internet has become an extension to modern life and times, with all the good and bad these times have to offer.
Short Column (Score:2)
Woah! A short column from Katz! I think I hear the earth's core freezing up. What's even more unlikely, I wish a Katz column was actually longer to explain his reasoning behind the classifications. I never thought I would actually want more Katz...
Anywaym, seems like many of these can be subsets. TechNet, GameNet, GodNet and X-Net are arguably just a very large neighborhoods in the umbrella of the CultureNet. (Geek culture, Xian culture, etc.)
Some of these need to be rearranged and re-edited too. For instance there are many CorpNet sites which are part of other categories like BuyNet etc. I think you need to concentrate on the actual content instead of who puts it up. Basically the internet has communities and services. Slashdot, tv, etc sites are communities. Auction, eBusiness, and most corporate sites are almost pure services. Need some sort of EduNet section in there somewhere too.
Still, cool idea. Thanks a lot.
Re:Content Areas (Score:2)
However, into which single category do you put a black Catholic vegetarian?
The problem is not with the categorization, but with the attempt to refer to the categories as "continents," which implies that they are separate and isolated. You can only be on one continent at once, unless you're straddling a border. The internet as it currently stands has far more border-straddlers than a continental model can handle. Where would you put a religious website (GodNet) that sees its mission as presenting information to the general public about religious issues (InfoNet), that also sells bibles and bumper stickers (BuyNet)?
CompleteLoonieNet (Score:2)
Granted, it was short as promised but nonetheless he manages to spew garbage as usual... The net is much too diverse to be broken up into any categories so simple as what he has attempted to list above.
Too much of everything spills into everything else. The Internet is the ultimate cosmic people soup. Look at Slashdot for instance.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Gore-Net? (Score:3)
Shouldn't Al Gore get his own continent where he can lord it over all other political candidates?
After all...he did invent the internet.
Re:Nice, but kinda incorrect (Score:2)
Stream of consciousness is also seen in novels. For example, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is a novel written entirely in stream of consciousness. The book actually contains a series of streams since it tends to jump at random from one character's head to another.
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land