Feeds:twenty days before the wedding
I just went Wiki-surfing. I started out looking up info on an advertised television show on the SciFi Channel called Haven, and ended up reading about the Miller Test, which governs obscenity. This came by way of the I Ching at about midpoint; there was also a side-branch that led to the Cantor Set.
I find myself a little nostalgic for "surfing the Internet" -one more thing Google has ruined forever. An unfair accusation, but a true one. The matter remains, however, that such surfing is now almost non-existent: websites just aren't built for it these days. Link pages, once the greatest resource for getting around online, have been rendered (even more) unprofitable by Google's page rankings, and Web 2.0 applications have reduced the demand for them.
Call me sentimental. Sometimes I go back to old, old websites - remember, the Internet never forgets - and click around. But it's not the same - the thrill of discovery is gone; these are archives, artifacts, the motive forces that made them now departed. Not depressing, exactly. More in the line of homesickness.
I guess I've never really taken to Web 2.0. I'm not going to say anything blindy cantankerous like that it's no good; it is good. But I'm an elitist, I guess. I liked the pride of being one of the producers in a world of consumers, and being able to connect with others such on a level above the masses. Now the masses are the producers as well, and the webmasters are just middlemen. That is, "just" as in I have scorn for them, the key characteristic of an elitist. The internet, always a lonely place, seems more so now that everyone's invited.
Enough complaining. I will now spend the rest of the afternoon trying to deny the urge to write soothsaying software, and also buying cupcakes.
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