I have been interested in internet/web-enabled social systems since
1979 when I first got an account on a UNIX machine and discovered
UUNet Mail and News in it's somewhat early form.
Ditto. Remember Gopher?
Too well.
We stood up the first www.lanl.gov as a perl script which responded to
HTTP get requests by parsing our gopher directory and serving it up as
HTML. Tim Berner's Lee added us to his "home page" and when I did a
count, we were #50 on his list of known web servers. It took nearly a
year after Mosaic came out to get the general populace to quit using
(and demanding that we support) Lynx and Gopher. Actually I think it
was more like 2 before we phased them all the way out. We stood up our
first "real" web server with an early A-Patchy (aka Apache) that other
folks at LANL had helped patch into existence.
And then we had the search-engine wars until Google won them hands down.
Unfortunately, there is something about what happens when the
unwashed masses use these technologies that is offensive to me. I'm
probably just some kind of elitist.
Me too, I wish the "civilians" weren't destroying my internet.
Yah... so I don't sign on to facebook much anymore... but everywhere I
look folks are "discovering" it and trying to "friend me".
<snip>
But let me be clear why I'm trying all this stuff. SFX has found
itself without administrators and with a hosting service that's more
difficult, but much more computer savvy, than facebook, twitter,
blogspot, pbwiki, ... Basically we have a user community with
contempt for computing and complexity both. (there are a few
exceptions, natch)
So several of us who alas are computer savvy, are starting to think we
should move sfx off a hosting service with its complexity onto the
pre-built, user oriented, non-hosted cloud. And to be fair, there's a
lot of good stuff that is starting to merge into something that could
replace Joyent/Wordpress with a mashup of Blogspot, Google Docs,
Twitter, Facebook, Maps/Earth, Youtube, Flickr, and so on.
I think we old timers have pushed the new generation non-tech folks
into a trap they'd prefer to skip. So I'd like to give them their
head for a bit and see how it goes. Become self-administered. No
joke, I'm for real here. Lose hosting, replace with the flower-child
web. I think they can pull it off.
Mash away!
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
