What is The Internet?

Wayne passed along a link that I had forgotten about. I remembered the powerful idea at the heart of the link but I had forgotten who had written it.

World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else by Doc Searls and David Weinberger is an explanation of how best to understand the Internet.

The Internet isn't a bunch of wires and cables and companies hooking computers together. The Internet is a set of agreements that allow people to hook networks up to each other seamlessly. The result is that for all practical purposes the Internet is the collection of all the computers attached to each other. It's the collection of computers at the outside edge of the network.

You computer, your laptop, and your cellphone are all part of the Internet.

We tend to think of the Internet as Google, and Amazon, and Blogger, and our bank, and other sites. They see the Internet as the place were all their customer's are. It turns out the Internet is both.

Maybe the best way to think of the Internet is to think of it as the place where we all meet and connect. It isn't a thing or a place. It's where all the computers and people at the ends of the network build a collective on which almost anything can happen.

If you haven't red Worlds of Ends I highly recommend it. It may change how you understand the Internet.

Remembering and Reviewing What We May Lose

The web is very ephemeral. What seems like a permanent place to store the creations of millions can disappear easily. Whole portions of the web can disappear overnight. Luckily we have groups like Archive Team to help collect and preserve portions of the web.

Large collections of websites such as Geocities have been saved when the original company running the servers decided to turn off the power and retire millions of pages. Archive Team also keeps track of sights on their last legs as well as maintaining a list of sites that seem healthy but contain massive amounts of important information.

Archive Team makes the point that even some of the archives of the web aren't well archived. It's sobering to read that even important archive sites like archive.org have only one copy and no backup of massive amounts of priceless data.

Still people are concerned. When it was announced that Geocities was closing down several spontaneous projects emerged to make copies of it while it was still online. Hundreds of ancient web pages written by people living and dead were preserved. And don't just think of the web. The internet has carried much more than just web traffic over the years. What happens to pieces of the net such as gopher when a protocol withers and all but dies? You can download your own snapshot of what was contained on gopher servers but that's only an incomplete snapshot of what's been lost.

What happens to the little gems on the web? The pieces that each of us consider part of our combined online heritage? What happens when those bits of the web stagnate? What can we do to make sure we don't lose them?

I started thinking about this when I was reminded of one of my favourite funny parts of the web. A place where the best of bad movie reviews were lovely collected over time for our enjoyment. I'm not talking about Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB. I'm talking about Defective Yeti's Bad Review Revue. From February 2002 to April 2009 Matthew Baldwin collected the choicest quotes about the latest crop of bad movies. Little gems where critics put into words exactly what they thought of movies.

Since April 2009 though there has been nothing. The Defective Yeti site continues but there have been some hiatuses and interruptions that made many of us who read it wonder if it would end and fade away like so many other online gems. Not only is there the potential loss of 7 years worth of bad review revues but Matthew hasn't continued collecting them and as fas as I can tell no one has taken up the cause. Jeff Milner took up the cause for a while but he's stopped collecting bad review revues as well.

I'm not picking on Defective Yeti. Matthew is a writer and dedicated to his various projects. I am not too worried that it will disappear from the web completely. I choose Defective Yeti's bad review revues because it is a perfect example of a small gem of the longer web. Lovely collected and presented by one person. A diversion that entertained (as does Defective Yeti in general) but is not being continued.

There are people and groups out there that are archiving the large sites and large projects and massive collections of data. Groups that don't want bits of our online culture and heritage to disappear. Which leaves me with a simple question.

Who's going to archive and protect all the smaller sites on the Internet?

What would you like preserved before it is erased, forgotten, or deleted?

The Internet Protects What it Finds Interesting

On the Internet it helps to be good at what you do but that isn't enough. Many people are funny or have an interesting outlook on life and still manage to disappear in the vast sea of people online. If you also happen to catch people's attention, well, then you're set.

One young man certainly has caught people's attention. Oprah Winfrey is holding a competition called "Your Own Show". It's a talent and popularity search for the "the next TV star". Zach Anner from Austin Texas submitted an audition tape to try and become that next TV star. Go watch it. It's a site to behold. What happened next is a classic example of the Internet's new attention economy.

Zach's audition was picked up by various sites that started to put in place vote getting campaigns. Some are simple "tell everyone you know to vote for Zach" affairs. Others simply said "go look and do what you know you must" and people did. I don't know if any sites tried to automate the voting to put Zach ahead. I don't think anyone needed to automate the process. How could you not vote for Zach after watching his video? Plus you'd hope by now online polls and votes are relatively immune to that sort of mass auto-voting. It shouldn't be possible to fix the vote from afar.

Zach's audition started getting mentioned in all sorts of places you wouldn't expect. The musician John Mayer did a "go watch this" blog post. All the attention from all those various corners of the Internet paid off and Zach stormed to the top of the voting. Even he didn't expect it. Here's how he reacted when he found out just how well he was doing. He even thanked John Mayer. Which lead to John offering musical support. If Zach wins hewon't have to worry about his show having a theme song.

But in the last day or so something happened to the voting. The second place contestant made a completely improbable run ahead. Something wasn't right. It seemed fishy. So the Internet that loves Zach for his outlook and humour decided to investigate and make sure everything was still on the up and up.

Never underestimate the collective investigative power of the Internet.

The investigation already has details of the source code on the voting page, graphs with the rates of changes of votes, and all sorts of technical details. People are going to get to the bottom of this. People want Zach to win. They had voted him into first place. They didn't want some chicanery to remove him from top stop. Especially if the chicanery seems to be going on in the site running the voting. The Internet protects what it finds interesting or finds out what's going on. In excruciating detail. Read the investigation if you don't believe me.

Whether Zach wins or not, whether he gets a show via Oprah or not, Zach is too much of a character and too much of a personality to just disappear. Zach will get a place to shine and many people, myself included, will tune in to watch. He'd do a great travel show. Remember, no Atlantis is too underwater or fictional.