http://www.newfangled.com/how_do_you_describe_the_internet Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:59:56 -0500 Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:59:56 -0500
]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/17461#comment17464 Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:23:14 -0400 http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/17461#comment17466 Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:25:10 -0400
The Wikipedia article on the Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Terminology) sums it up well: "The Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs." If the Web was Disney World, the Internet would be the monorail.

But not to avoid responding to the semantic meaning of the post, I'll describe the Web with how I see it. Arauz's depth metaphor works well for me, though I tend to look at it more like panning versus mining for gold. The gold found panning is valuable in itself, but you usually throw out a lot of rocks to find them. Finding these specks of gold is an indication that there might be a lode nearby.

So for me, I spend time panning for gold on Twitter or reading the top headlines on Proggit or Hacker News. I see Twitter as being the "come pan for gold with your kids" attractions seen in the mountains, and the more focused aggregators as the more off-road, locals only mining creeks.

The occasional shiny rocks you get from these come-all creeks might point towards a fruitful mine. Getting something of value from these deep pockets of information may be more work as they can't usually be summed up in a Twitter message, but you take away so much more value.
]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/17461#comment17467 Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:51:47 -0400
Point taken on the semantics behind the terms "internet" and "web." What we're really talking about here, then, is describing the web, which is, in itself, a descriptive term. Of course, one of the obvious limitations of using "web" is that it tends to connote a two-dimensional image, rather than one which is clearly of a different spatial sense altogether.

The panning-for-gold metaphor works, too, although the connections from one site to another that Arauz indicates is probably more analogous to getting a verbal direction from a "local" to the panning site, than the act of panning itself.]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/17461#comment17468 Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:09:11 -0400
Though, I'm not sure if I see how the web doesn't work with a two-dimensional abstraction, as having the idea of all the pages of the Web laid out on a giant table with strings connecting them to each other seems to work well.

Here's one example of how it works in 2-D: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#Algorithm

You're right with my analogy, though; it didn't really work as far as describing the web, but more of how I use the web, which was the correct answer to the wrong question.
]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/17461#comment17469 Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:44:57 -0400
I think this discussion really shows that descriptive terms for something like the web are likely to always be diverse given that our experience of the web varies based upon who is using it and why. Sometimes a more static description may fit as we envision the current "shape" of the web, whereas other times a more action-oriented term may seem more appropriate if we're actually sending/receiving information (e.g. "superhighway").

In any case, I don't mind getting a little pedantic for the sake of a good discussion... I searched for images of spider webs and came up with the following:



One reason I'm not completely fond of the web image is because a spider's web is pretty systematic in it's design, with concentric rows expanding out from a central point. Each row is connected in segments by the intersection of the expanding diagonals. Of course, we know that the web we're talking about isn't quite built in that way. The rate of expansion is much too fast to adhere to the same "design" standards. I often think of the shape of the web as being much more like a fractal, where points of information create "explosions" of information emanating outward. When I did a Google image search for "web," I actually came up with the following image, which is much more what I had in mind:



Chris]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/17461#comment17485 Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:00:57 -0400
And the spider's web doesn't help much as it's only a very crude visualisation of a highly complex system. So "why things that blow up and become hugely popular on the web do so at the top strata" doesn't make a lot of sense if it can only describe itself in its own fuzzy dimension.]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/17461#comment17487 Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:51:14 -0400
It's true- no visualization will be fully accurate, nor will any particular verbal description either since the web is corporeal in nature.

Chris]]> http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/17461#comment17517 Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:08:01 -0400