The Web is Becoming Increasingly Overwhelming

The year was 1996. I was creating my first website. It was about Pokemon, games, and programming. Life was simpler back then. The Internet felt like a relatively small community. The number of webmasters was a fraction of what it is today. There was less information. Spam was not a problem, search engines were not ubiquitous. It was like a club. It felt like its own community.

Not anymore. I’m starting to be overwhelmed by the Internet. More specifically, everyone has their own blog now, and maybe two, three, four, or fifty. They have their own forums. And those forums have thousands and thousands of members. Thousands and thousands of posts, each. With millions signing on daily. When I started getting online, 14.4 Kbps was fast. 28.8 Kbps was the latest thing until 33.6 and finally 56K came along. Of course, broadband revolutionized the way content was presented. Firefox put control into the hands of the user. And today, the web is much more complex than it used to be.

The problem, if it is a problem, is getting worse. Tonight I started browsing some sites that launched off from Google. I looked for Amazon.com stores, or sites based on the Amazon Associates system. There’s lots of stuff all over now. This used to be relatively unknown. Not so anymore. Word spreads faster now. And yet it is still harder to sort through. Information is better organized, but it still takes long to find something. Connection speeds are faster, but it still takes time to download something.

I am using BitTorrent now, as I type. It is an amazing program. Who knew that bandwidth could be distributed across so many computers so effectively?

I browsed forums like Web Hosting Talk, Digital Point. Referred to old articles on Website Publisher. Read NamePros. Wikipedia. It’s just huge. When I first got online, nobody knew HTML. Today, people throw around XHTML/CSS like it’s nothing. Ajax is in. User interface design advances on an hourly basis. Communications take the form of not only text, but audio, photos, video, connections, relationships.

I used to feel like I could read, learn, and know everything about a subject that the Internet had to offer. Of course, there’s now always more. No matter how much of an expert you are, there is an unimaginable amount more. But someone had to start it. The original idea had to come from somewhere. Original thoughts are still being formed. Where are they? How can I find them today?

Google is making information easier to find. But they’re also making it explode. Someday, it is going to change. It is going to revolutionize, or it is going to collapse.