Web One

Mosaic was my very first web-browser back in ... 1993 (I think).

In those early years of the internet commercial websites. largely, did not exists. A few amateurs wrote a single page of Hyper-Text code in text editors and and ran an Apache web-server on their home computers that allowed the World to connect and read their page, see their pictures, understand their lives. It was before Google and most search-engines.

In those day we had 'start-pages' - we would type a known start-page link into our browser, choose a topic, click a further link and behold we might land in someone's hobby-room or garden.

Each landing place had on overwhelming feeling of camaraderie and generousness; each link took us somewhere new and away. Each page-author was sharing an aspect of their life but saying - 'here I like this too, go there!' I talked to people in Japan and Holland, for example, by leaving visitor comments where we could. The World felt kind, people felt helped and comforted, differences between races became insignificant because we were all surfers seeing each other in a new light and realizing their hopes were like mine. Their family photos looked similar to mine; their lives similar to mine. Differences were being broken down. The World was on its way to becoming a community. We were able to surf anywhere.

And we did. It was possible to spend a whole evening just 'surfing the Internet'. Advertisers picked up the meme - it was that important - the phrase became part of our vocabulary. Today it has no meaning because surfing the internet is not possible. Conspiracy theorists would say 'surfing stopped by design' with the Nationalists not liking it. Occam's Razor would suggest it stopped because of commerce - your eyeballs began to have a commercial value - the more those eyeballs could be counted as having seen an online-advertisement, the more money the web-site owner made. There became reason to trap your eyeballs on their pages for as long as possible.

Around the year 2000 came Web-Two. Dot-com became the plague of the internet. Commercial interests smelled the money, the power, the influence, the fame and almost overnight web-surfing stopped. All generosity, (well almost all), went out the Windows 2000. If you landed on a web page, links were only to things deeper in the web-site. People were no longer surfing the wave-top but sinking, drowning even, below. Commercialism had made its succession.

The innovator and early-adopter web-site slowly began to disappear. My site providing weather data for Private Pilots, the first in the World to calculate Airfield Density Altitude from meteorological data closed too. Costs for just being connected and having web-traffic began to increase in the way anything popular does. But even in that environment some sites continued and a few new ones started - niche sites - as they became known,

Bigcloset was one of them. And it too has gone through the cycle. It started with generosity, with help at its core; the stories were free; readers were invited to constructively comment. Now almost every author wants money and the story link is to a pay site. Oh shame on you Bigcloset! You've allowed money changers into the Temple.

What authors probably don't think about is their manipulation. By posting their story - dross of otherwise - on a pay-site - the site owner takes their tithe. Happy days to be a site-owner - all these slaves brainwashed to follow convention, just typing-up cash for free. Please wake up, you authors, and realize your pay-site gives you only a few percent of your possible readership and you help perpetuate Web-Two.

[I write computer code as a hobby. I have several Repositories on Github and software available elsewhere. One source program I am able to monitor had 22,705 downloads, up to the middle of last month; it has achieved some small acclaim.
I provide all I write for free.]