Warmest Greetings,

The Planet Is Shrinking (Again)  

:: Monday, March 01, 2004 ::

When my old 386 PC was in my kitchen, across from the refrigerator, I was on cloud nine. A stay at home mom for a few years so I could be home with my second-born, I battled cabin fever and a disintegrating brain by dialing up every few mintues to check for emails and new posts on the many lists I'd joined.

If you remember what websites looked like back then in the middle 1990's, they were clunky and clumsy. Most were personal webpages, which didn't have great spelling or user oriented design. We tolerated frames and scanned endless pages with banner ads thrown all over them. Nobody worried about being found in search engines unless they were a company with something to say or something to sell.

Now, you wonder if Google and Yahoo! will ever crawl the whole Web and nab every page that exists. How many people have the same keywords these days and are competing for products? Social networking is all the rage. (Why?) Are we any closer to what we wanted to do with the Internet?

I thought it was funny to see certain articles crop up lately that seem to say nobody is quite sure if we've got the knack of website building down yet, after all these years. For example:

The Sad State of Web Content
"Your average Web site is damn near unreadable when you look at it as a whole, and it?s pretty rare to find a site that adheres to the techniques that make good Web content. The sad fact is that most companies don?t pay near enough attention to their content, many times it?s treated as an afterthought, or worse, filler."

The Web and The Good Things
"Many people don't respect the Web's potential. The treat it as a dumping ground for superfluous thoughts, marketing spiel and porn. They use it to trick, manipulate and take advantage of others. E-mail spam, comment spam, referrer spam, pop-ups, scams, poorly designed and written Web sites, hoaxes and all the rest do their best to keep people wary and ignorant to the full potential that could be achieved with the Web."

Speaking of potential, I love Nathan Shedroff: The InfoDesign interview By Dirk Knemeyer (March 2004)
"I truly believe that design can create change for the better but most designers view their place in the world as decorators of one form or another. Some view performance and usability as within their domain but few of these even view business issues, social issues, or structural issues as falling within their domain. "

FastCompany's March issue delved into lessons learned from the dotcom crash days. Anyone still dreaming of riches made via the Internet should read the issue, including Lessons From The New Economy
"Everyone learned, or relearned, something from the epic boom and bust. We ask five of that era's luminaries for their insight."

And, Relics of the New Economy: Where Are They Now?

"5. Marc Andreessen and 6. Jim Clark, Netscape cofounders
Then: It was the IPO that launched a million dreams. In 1995, Netscape (started only 16 months before by 22-year-old whiz kid Andreessen and Silicon Valley insider Clark) soared 154% at the opening bell.

Now: Andreessen is chairman of a company called Opsware, which delivers some sort of solution to some sort of enterprise. Clark and Tom Jermoluk, former chief of Excite@Home, started a real-estate firm."

Whatever happened to the search engine, Excite? Keeping The First Chapter From Being The Last Joe Kraus Cofounder, Excite.com
"Worth more than $500 million at one moment, Kraus saw his company fall to pieces after an ill-fated merger with Internet cable outfit @Home."

Meanwhile, SEO folks are pounding down beers and snapping up the latest search engine information this week at the SES Conference. Cre8asiteForums hopes members who are there fill us in here >>>SES conference NY

It's March 1, so that means it's Leek Day and/or St. Davids Day. That's a leek in the Cre8asiteForums logo.

Which brings me full circle. We may not all agree on what the Internet is for or how to use it, but we do know how to make some pretty creative pictures. Earth seemed like a gigantic room which, by use of the Internet, problems could be solved because people could converse with one another. But, now it holds child porn and bomb making instructions. What is going wrong?

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 3/01/2004 10:57:36 AM

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