yesterday at 1:22 pm
- Link
During the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was bright and shiny and new, it exerted a strong centrifugal force on us. And that landscape felt not only new but liberating. But that view was an illusion. Even back then, the counterforce to the web's centrifugal force - the centripetal force that would draw us back toward big, central information stores - was building. Hyperlinks were creating feedback loops that served to amplify the popularity of popular sites, feedback loops that would become massively more powerful when modern search engines, like Google, began to rank pages on the basis of links and traffic and other measures of popularity. Navigational tools that used to emphasize ephemera began to filter it out. Roads out began to curve back in. Wikipedia provides a great example of the formative power of the web's centripetal force. . At heart a vast exercise in cut-and-paste paraphrasing (it explicitly bans original thinking. Wikipedia is the lazy man's link... - katepe







