Archive for the ‘The Internet’ category

Gotta get a life

October 26th, 2009

So just now I was at the is.gd URL-shortening website shortening a URL when I noticed that the counter on the homepage that tells you how many URLs have been shortened read 66,666,134. Being the sad loser that I am I sat there refreshing the homepage, desperately trying to score 66,666,666. I just missed.

I need a hobby.

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Trusting Google #2

September 5th, 2009

Further to my thoughts the other day about the nature of relying on free “cloud” services such as those offered by Google, here is a public apology and explanation offered by a Google Vice President in response to Tuesday’s outage:

Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.

Here’s what happened: …

Head on over if you want to read about the techy stuff behind the outage, but the point I’d make is that a company that is this open and honest is much easier to trust. Google works hard to put a human face on a technical and business behemoth and the result is a more trusting and satisfied user base. Still going to think twice about what I put on Google’s servers and backup my data in the future, but.

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Trusting Google

September 2nd, 2009

I love Google. I don’t think there’s any other company’s products that I get so much value out of each day without paying a cent. From the moment I check email and my RSS subscriptions over breakfast in Gmail and Google Reader respectively I am using Google products constantly throughout the day. Besides from the obvious Google search (one of the most-used applications on my iPhone) I am a heavy user of Google Docs and Google Maps.

I’d be a bit lost without Google, and lost I was this morning when this message appeared while trying to open Gmail.

In the end I’d opened my email within five minutes but it definitely got me thinking: how much do I rely on the data that I have saved on Google’s servers and how screwed would I be if I lost access to it? The answer: quite.

I’ve got 2.6GB of mail in my Gmail account and I realise now that I tend to use Gmail as a repository for information that I want to keep, relying on my access to Gmail and its internal search function to find that info at the moment I need it. I have dozens of documents in Google Docs that I currently need to view or edit, such as those my girlfriend and I collaboratively edit to plan our overseas trip, or bits and pieces that I like to work on at home and elsewhere on different computers with Internet access. If my Google account were locked or unavailable for any lengthy period of time I’d be in trouble.

The thing is, the benefits of Google products are significant: they’re free, easy to use, collaborative and in the “cloud”. Thinking about the risks, I still think the benefits outweigh them. Such heavy use of Google’s free applications requires a certain level of trust, and I’m prepared to trust in Google understanding that breaching their users’ trust would have extremely negative commercial side effects. Having said that, I’m going to put some serious thought into backing up the most important stuff in my Gmail inbox to my own computer, and consider a regular backup routine of my Google Docs.

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Wikiawesome

August 23rd, 2009

Wikipedia is awesome. Not only is it an excellent information resource, it’s a shining example of the power of the Internet. Having recently hit the three million article mark in its English language section (13 million articles in total), Wikipedia has cemented itself as easily the best free general information source on the tubes. Not bad for eight years’ collaborative work by nerds around the world.

But those eight years have not been without controversy, as the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia says:

Critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to popular culture), and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial process. Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy are also an issue. Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information, though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.

Despite this, I still think that Wikipedia is everything that is awesome about the Internet. What other tool in history has facilitated a project on the scale of Wikipedia, accessible by all and egalitarian in its creation, maintenance and use? Remember when you used to have to shell out a couple of grand for a couple of hundred kilos of encyclopaedias that were out of date the moment the ink dried on the paper? Wikipedia has helped bring knowledge to the masses. The trade-off is susceptibility to the effects cited above, but in my opinion the positives far outweigh the negatives. Wikipedia is what it is: a free resource that serves as an outstanding starting point for research. And as long as it is used sensibly (that is, compared to, analysed against, and synthesised with other information sources) it is worth more than its servers’ weight in gold.

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Internet geography

August 10th, 2009

When a certain website featuring an orange-and-blue theme and a pretzel mascot closed down recently, a recurring theme became apparent to me during my conversations with others and in reading what people had to say about that closure. Many people said, in one form of words or another, that the Internet had changed, or that there was a piece suddenly missing. This got me thinking about how Internet users visualise a virtual world that feels very real to them and make it somehow tangible. At the pub, talking about this concept with a mate, I blurted out a name for the phenomenon: Internet geography.

And it’s true — any of us who have spent a decent amount of time on the Internet, and especially loitering around the blogosphere, know what it feels like when a site that holds significance to us (for negative or positive reasons) disappears. It’s like a hole opens up in our mental map of the tubescape, just like a building being demolished on the main street of our suburb. It’s important to separate this alteration to our mind map from any emotions we may feel about the site’s disappearance; acknowledgement of a change does not necessarily indicate fond sentimentality or sadness or even elation.

We don’t even need to know what a website looks like for it to feature in our geography. I have at least a dozen blogs in my RSS reader that I’ve not actually visited at in the past year, their existence only proven to me through a themeless data feed. I’ve completely forgotten what these blogs’ front pages look like but they still exist in my mind as actual places, complete with detailed and unique characteristics that, no matter how hard I try, I can’t quite put into words.

The cyberworld is a zero-dimensional place, existing as a stream of ones and zeros travelling near light speed down copper and fibre cables and manifesting itself as light on a two-dimensional screen. Yet the words we use to describe our use of the Internet are all based on three-dimensional movement: surf, navigate, go to, drop into, etc.

The way I see it, each Internet user builds in their mind a unique Internet geography based upon the sites that they know exist, the frequency at which they visit those sites, and the importance of that site to the user for whatever reason.This geography is highly dynamic, responding constantly to the user’s evolving use of the Internet and relationship to websites.

What do you reckon about this theory of Internet geography? Do you have a mental map of the Internet that reflects the way you use it? Do you think there are other things that contribute to this map? Have you had any particular experiences where a site’s closure has forced you to redraw your own Internet geography?

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Posted in Metablogging, The Internet

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