Accept no substitutes

100 Million Websites

Just took a call from John Hill of WCHL 1360-AM for comments on the CNN story “Web Reaches New Milestone: 100 Million Sites.”

It’s not clear to me immediately what constitutes a site, perhaps a unique URL?, but a serious looking guy from Netcraft (Rich Miller) assures us on the CNN bit (and at the Netcraft site) that we are there in numbers. If each MySpace and Facebook entry were considered a web site, where would we be? Note: I see from the Netcraft site linked just above that he means hosts not sites.

With the Google acquisitions of JotSpot, Writerly, and YouTube, we can see that the web site per se is less important than web services that allow for collaboration, cooperative work and contribution of and comment on content. Even at this the content is less important than the social acts of embedded in the collaboration, etc.

My first web page, perhaps web site?, was created on a NeXT with Tim Berners-Lee looking on back in 1992. It was ahead of its time. Not because I made it or anything that I did, but because TBL’s web browser wasn’t a browser. It was a collaborative communications tool from its conception.

I opened two windows. One in which I surfed the web — all 5 or so sites. One in which I created my web page. I took TBL’s own page and added my changes making it my own. I then added new links by highlighting and dragging to the composing window. It as completely collaborative.

We are only nearing that ease of collaboration and creation now with what Dale Dougherty named Web 2.0.

I also got off on how all of this ongoing storm of creativity is fed and nourished by Net Neutrality. Write your senator and support Net Neutrality today!

2 Comments

  1. Sayan

    I came across this article on BBC ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6108578.stm ) where TBL says “When you look at university courses, web science isn’t there – it seems to fall through the cracks ”

    The latter half of the article is entirely devoted to this idea. I think this is a good opportunity for SILS to pursue. Just my $0.02 Love to hear your take on the issue and what SILS is planning to do about this.

  2. Paul

    The announcement from Southhampton and MIT give a little more background. I see this as Computer Science trying to pick up all the threads they lost when they ignored anything besides technology. Web 2.0 and News 2.0 and Business 2.0 use technologies but the secret sauce that makes GooTube, Flickr, Blogger, even NetFlix and Amazon work and be worth millions isn’t the technology — I keep saying.
    Kathy Sierra has a nice and timely bit on her “Creating Passionate Users” blog called Why does Science/math/engineering education education in the US suck?”
    In UNC SILS, we like to think we are already there using sociology, psychology, history, story telling, systems thinking, etc starting from a human interaction perspective.

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