Is the Internet getting full?
Posted on May 27th, 2008 by sherrilynne
Remember life before the Internet? Think back 12 years or so. What was your work life like? How many computers did you have? How many secretaries were on your team? How big was the stack of post and memos you received each morning? Now, could you to go back to working that way?
We might just have to, if one of America’s largest telecoms providers is right. AT&T claims that Internet’s current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity in just two years, unless there is some serious investment in networks right now.
They point to the surge in video and other rich content that’s being uploaded thanks to advances in Web 2.0 technology. They predict that in three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.
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Now I AM worried. How much do you figure it would cost to string a cable from the Isle of Man to my house in the French countryside?
I’m not sure Reg. But I’ll bet someone from Manx Telecom can sort you out!
I have 2 gripes about Web2.0 and they both relate to the explosion of web content.
My first is based on CMS and the ammount of free (Advert filled) Social Networking hosts that makes much of Web2.0 possible.
Secondly is the growth in duplication.
Back in August 2002 when I started a Blog there were a handful of basic templates available, but to create your own look and feel you had to look behind the facade and learn basic HTML and CSS, mainly through tutorials and good old fashioned trial and error. In the first couple of months of owning a Blog as much, if not more time was spent looking for mistakes in edited code that caused pages to display wrong or tweaking the code to co-ordinate the text, graphics and colour schemes.
It was part of the blood, sweat and tears that were required and accepted by webspace administrators.
Once we newbies were told that web sites should aim to be unique and original, to use the space (and limited telecom bandwith) to be informative and not to bog pages down with content that offered little value to the prospective reader.
Jump forward to 2008 and it’s all embeded code and widgets. Yes they enable pages to become more user interactive, but they opened the doors to a flood of bloggers and social networkers that didn’t need to have respect for the Netiquette and ‘learnt knowledge’ that had kick started the Net revolution.
Now wherever we look we find mass duplication of websites each one hosting mass duplication of everyone elses content.
I love the technology behind sites such as YouTube that enabled original user generated content, but hate that the site and many clones carry the same low quality pixelated clips hundreds of times over and much of it is Television content supposedly protected by copyright and already often available on the TV channels websites.
Without wishing to sound old and moany, hotlinking was once frowned upon by webmasters, now it has been widgitised and is encouraged by those that seek to earn revenue from click throughs and adwords.
I like reading articles that include links to external sources and explanations and often end up with a line of open tabs as I click back and forth and increase my Favorites folder, but sadly the ratio of original content and pleasing to the eye pages is in serious decline whilst the space that the WWW takes up is exponentially rising.
Maybe time to start a new Blog calling for the banning of free (advert funded) webspace and widgets
Mark
Mark thanks for your thoughts on this. I like that the technology is taking a back seat so the people can focus on the communication. Makes blogging less scary for many.
Agreed with Mark, web is far too easy to get in to now. Widgets and the like expose holes in web site reliability that have accessibility, security and usability issues – let alone making the embedded content behave within your own design and framework. “Web 2.0″ should have come after “Web 3.0″. Now, we have a huge mass of content that is indexless, pointless and mindless. If it was at least semantic, it would be kept out of the way of the serious net user.
On your comment about NGN, Sherrilynne. What happened to the NGN when the mobile network went down on Friday afternoon (30 May 2008). This caused huge hassle for the islanders and TT visitors, caused issues for competitors (who no doubt pay handsomely for access to MT networks) and even caused outage in Radio TT. It also caused problems in us being able to supply our premium TT services. “We have the capacity”? I think not.
Good advice on Domain Names, though, particularly as the landrush for the .me domain is imminent. I’m going to have to speculatively pay about £100 on domains that may have legs. Might be a lot of money, but if you can get that domain, you’ll be laughing.
Nathan I’m not sure what happened with the MT’s network on Friday. You’d have to contact their PR agency about that . Ta for the domain name feedback though!