Amazing Times

WARNING: NERD ALERT!

Last week the church lost it's internet connection for 8 days. It felt absolutely paralyzing. It is amazing how much I (we) interact with the internet every day. Even though I was 20 before I had my first e-mail address, I feel like I have always been "on-line." I can remember when having a 56K modem was the top of line connection. Now I get frustrated with the church's DSL line because it's slower than my cable modem at home.

Thinking about how frustrated I was that I didn't have the internet at work made me reflect on just how huge the NET is in all of our lives. Then I read a fascinating article in my WIRED magazine called "We Are The Web". I wanted to post a few excerpts from that article that I found completely fascinating. Feel free to stop reading if your nerd meter has already maxed out! By the way, the globe above represents the size of the respective national Internet top-level domain code represented by the amount of users (.de is Germany at about 15 million users circa 2001).

"The internet," one senior executive at ABC told me, "will be the CB radio of the '90's."

"The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive."

"In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people."

"Ten years ago I heard skeptics swear nobody would ever buy a car on the Web. Last year eBay Motors sold $11 billion worth of vehicles."

"No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds."

"Ordinary folks invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion."

"A simple link, it turns out, is the most powerful invention of the decade."

"When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day that humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea."

"We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity."

"We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that pivotal moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. You and I are alive at [one of these] this moment."

Since we have seen life without the Web and would probably choose not to go back (you are reading a Blog). What kinds of things do you want or expect to see in the next 10, 15, 20 years of the internet? What is it that will amaze you and seems almost unimaginable, but you know in your gut that it will happen?