What’s wrong with the internet today?

I like to blame Web 2.0. What is Web 2.0?

Wikipedia (which is Web 2.0) defines it as such:

Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.

Let’s take a closer look at this.

Aims to enhance creativity. Uh, yeah. I feel no more creative now, in 2008 using the web than I did back in 1998, when I first got it in my home. In fact, I’d say the reverse is true. I feel as though I was more creative around the time of the dotcom crash, say around 2000. Before I registered Oapboap.org, I ran several sites on free internet servers. Mainly because having and running your own domain was rather expensive back in the day. Back then, I had to use whatever the host provided. I didn’t even know what a Server Side Include was until roughly 2002, because the free sites generally never had them enabled. That was roughly the time I learned about css. No, you see, back then I had to, get this, write my pages in HTML. I also had to decide how I wanted my layout: Single page, tables or frames. Remember those? They were awesome. What I’m saying is I had to be creative and weave this shit on every page. I learned quickly how SSIs were a godsend. Not to mention CSS. We got it easy now. Hell, I press a button (on a webpage) and Oapboap.org changes its layout.

Imformation sharing. Right. As if writing a static webpage about, say, your favorite video game, and giving it a walkthrough isn’t information sharing. Again, now it’s only easier. Now, most the time, things just work. How is it better now? Oh yeah, now every single faggot with an internet connection can do it. Which now leads me to the following.

Collaboration among users. Okay, I’ll give it this. Because it’s so much easier now. I guess that’s a good thing. But that leads to:

Blogging. Oh, holy fuck. I’ve said it before, I use blooging software to make it easier to update my website. Instead of making a new .shtml file, uploading it, modifying the index file, uploading that, changing anything the needs to be changed and then making sure I did it right; now all I do is type in a text box (on a webpage), click a button (on a webpage) and the software does the work. Yes, please. But, now, since the internet is available to everyone that can drop a month; we have an influx of people who wish to infect the web with thier writing. Rather than learning the skills to make a decent webpage on their ISP provided space, they become some blogging faggot. Then we get quality updates to the internet like this (and I am not shitting you, I witnessed this): “my knees are cold” Really? No shit? GUESS WHAT!

I.
Don’t.
Fucking.
CARE!

That shit belongs in IM, NOT THE ENTIRE INTERNET. FUCK. Bloggers like that are faggots and need to be executed as quickly as possible. Holy shit, whoever thought that it was a good idea to let people write about their daily lives on the internet, and NOT be interesting, should realize what has happened, invent a time machine, go back in time and STOP THEMSELVES FROM LETTING IT HAPPEN. However, keep the software. Because, you know, :effort:. However, blogs that are interesting are awesome. For example Waiter Rant is probably one of the best blogs on the internet. But, I digress. Let’s continue.

Social-networking. Fuck, this a blessing and a curse. I wouldn’t have certain internet friends if it weren’t for that. Or keeping up with high school friends. But, then we have the better side of it. Did I say better? I ment worse, darker. How many of you have ever written a customer review? Or eBay feed back? Most of you have. Now, let me ask you this, dear reader, is your review negative? What bout your feedback? What’s that, not negative? So, we generally write positive reviews and positive feedback? I see most you out there agreeing with me. Well, guess what? It’s not supposed to be all positive. Criticism helps. It helps a lot. Here’s an example:

You’re a cook (I know you office workers are shaking, real actual labor.), and you’re really good at what you do. Except for one thing, you can’t cook pasta to save your life. Know what you’ll be hearing from your waitstaff and customers? “Oh, this meal was excellent.” “Table 59 told me to tell you that you did excellent.” But, in the back of your mind you knew you overcooked the pasta slightly; and when it gets to the table, it’ll be even more overcooked. Know what I’d like to hear? “Table 59 said their meal was good, but the pasta was a little chewy.” Know why I wanna hear that? It tells me about a weakness, an it’ll actually help me in the future.

What I’m saying it that too many positives hinder more than help. It really won’t do much with mega-corps, unless too many people ‘get loud’, but it’ll help Joe Blogging Webmaster with his site. Tell him that his writing on his latest article wasn’t as strong as another one of his articles. Tell him his layout can be somewhat confusing (it may work for him, but not for you). Things may actually happen, and Joe Blogging Webmaster may become the next “The Waiter”. Get it?

Wikis. I love Wikis. So much. Rather than going to like 15 websites, I go to one, and I can learn practically everything about anything. Specialized Wikis are even better. Instead of just a few pages on the main Wikipedia, there’s an entire site and several pages devoted to a certain topic. Did you know that there was an animation of Sonic holding his breath that’s unused in Sonic 1? Or that the “Sega” sound effect took up 1/8th of the cart? You do now.

Web-based communities. I’m totally down with these. I shelled out to become one of them, ad it’s been great since. I’m also a LiveJournal faggot, who really doesn’t use it as an online diary journal. I’m also an anon-o-blogger. But that’s not really a community. My anon-o-blog is interesting.

Folksonomies. What the fuck are these?

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary. Folksonomy is a portmanteau of the words folk and taxonomy, hence a folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy.

Oh. That social bookmarking bullshit that I don’t understand. Ooooh, we can share bookmarks. No thank you, I don’t share my porn sites with anyone. Most the sites I frequent are kept open inn their own tab in Safari. Why should I share? And why should I let an internet faggot, who I don’t know, recommend a site for me? If I want to find a new site, I will google my interest and go from there. HOW HARD.

Point of this article: Remember the glory days of the internet before it became so personal.

Don’t get me started on sharing personal information. The most you need to know about me is I like video games, I like to type, and I hate the new-age internet faggots. I want my circa 2000 internet back. And I want it back now.

Except for WordPress. I’ll keep that.