My website’s kind of fun for me. I get to do drawings on that. It’s kind of fun. – Jeff Bridges
So, I wasn’t expecting this.
A few days ago I remembered that there was a first website.
It’s here.
I like it. I wish the web was still like this, because it was useful for those of us that like to read.
The point of it was to connect information to other information. Hypertext was text that linked to other text. And you also had hypermedia – which was sound and images and stuff like that.
The basic idea was that information could be nonlinear – it could connect to anything else and you could discover new, surprising things.
And with so much out there you needed an index, something that would help you find more information on a topic.
Well.. that was then.
The web is still about connections but instead of a distributed collection of information we have a few, very large sites that people live on.
Rather unhappily, I think.
The problem with search as a strategy is that you need to know what you’re searching for in the first place.
And sometimes we don’t know what we’re looking for.
But the really interesting stuff isn’t what gets the attention.
What we see is what people pay to put in front of us – and if you live in the West you probably don’t notice how cleverly this is done.
When I used Google in India I was amazed at just how blatantly it acted as an advertising machine – all the results looked promoted and you couldn’t find anything organic.
The Internet today is like the Standard American Diet – full of empty calories – all fat and sugar.
But there are good diets out there – for your mind, that is.
The first website knew it – it links to Project Gutenberg, a library of free books.
And you can discover other gems.
I start these posts with a search for a quote.
And I found the one above by Jeff Bridges – the actor – and given the topic of this blog I was intrigued.
Go look at his site.
You didn’t expect that, did you?
Maybe there is hope for us after all.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 