Since all on this board are users of the public internet and utilize the World Wide Web, I thought you might be interested in this Wall Street Journal editorial from yesterday's issue. Very thought provoking, and well to keep in mind when looking at ways to improve our lives.

People like Greg Susong are among the many whose love of what they do has provided this fantastic tool for our collecting hobby. Those who are in the computer and information business will appreciate the task that has been peformed by the many web authors in providing 3 billion web pages, mostly free, for all to enjoy!

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Commentary

The Web Runs On Love, Not Greed

By Kevin Kelly. Mr. Kelly, a co-founder of Wired magazine, is author of "New Rules for the New Economy" (Viking, 1998).

Right on cue, the demise of the dot-com revolution has prompted skepticism of the Internet and all that it promised. An honest evaluation would have to admit that 2001 was a very bad year for hip start-up companies, high-tech investors, and hundreds of thousands of workers in the technology field. Three trillion dollars lost on Nasdaq, 500 failed dot-coms, and half a million high-tech jobs gone. Even consumers in the street are underwhelmed by look-alike gizmos and bandwidth that never came.

The hundreds of ways in which the Internet would "change everything" appear to have melted away, or to have not happened at all. As the new year begins, a collective new year's resolution is surfacing: "Next year, next time, we won't believe the hype."

This revised view of the Internet is as misguided as the previous view that the Internet could only go up. The Internet is less a creation dictated by economics than it is a miracle and a gift.

Netscape's legendary initial public offering in 1995 launched the Web in the mind of the public. That jumpstart happened not much more than 2,000 days ago. Since then, we have collectively created more than three billion public Web pages. We've established 20 million Web sites. Each year we send about 3.5 trillion e-mail messages.

If we could return back time a mere six years ago and ask anyone, even a geek, whether we could create three billion interactive, graphically rich, hyperlinked text pages on every subject known to humans, we would have been told it was impossible. I would have told you it was impossible. Send three trillion e-mails? Where is the time even to push the send button? Who is going to pay for the creation of three billion Web pages, each one of which must be designed and coded and hosted? The economics of this don't work out. In 2,000 days? It's impossible. Yet, here at the end of a very bad year, this Web is alive and still growing. It looks like a miracle.

In our disappointment of grand riches, we have failed to see the miracle on our desks. Ten years ago, it was easy to dismiss visions of a wondrous screen in our homes that would provide the whole world in its magical window. The idea of a universal information port was considered uneconomical, and too futuristic to be real in our lifetimes.

Yet at any hour of today, most readers of this paper have access to the full text of the Encyclopedia Britannica, precise map directions to anywhere in the country, stock quotes in real time, local weather forecasts with radar pictures, immediate sports scores from their hometown, any kind of music they could desire, answers to medical questions, hobbyists who know more than they do, tickets to just about anything, 24/7 e-mail, news from a hundred newspapers, and so on.

Much of this is for free. This abundance simply overwhelms what was promised by the most optimistic guru.

Why don't we see this miracle? Because large amounts of money can obscure larger evidence. So much money flew around dot-coms that it hid the main event on the Web, which is the exchange of gifts. While the 50 most popular Web sites are crassly commercial, most of the three billion Web pages are not. Only 30% of the pages on the Web are built by companies and corporations like Pets.com. The rest is built on love, such as Care4pets.com or Responsiblepetcare.org.

The answer to the mystery of why people would make three billion Web pages in 2,000 days is simple: sharing. While everyone was riveted by the drama of companies such as Pets.com, we overlooked the steady growth of enthusiast sites and governmental depots such as Usenet and Nasa.gov, to name some larger ones.

As the Internet continues to expand in volume and diversity, only a relatively small percent of its total mass will be money-making. The rest will be created and maintained out of passion, enthusiasm, a sense of civic obligation, or simply on the faith that it may later provide some economic use. High-profile portal sites like Yahoo and AOL will continue to consolidate and demand our attention (and maybe make some money), while millions of smaller sites and hundreds of millions of users do the heavy work of creating content that is used and linked. These will be given away as gifts to the world.

Will we ever appreciate this Web woven out of love and greed for the miracle it is? Perhaps as more of the world wins access to it, and more of our books, and movies, and history are added, we will come to see it as a dream come true, a collective dream created by people like you and me, sharing what they love. Who would have guessed that at the end of a harrowing year the heart of this gift and miracle already beats?

Copyright © 2002 Kevin Kelly