?I’ve refined my ideas about building
WebPages.? It’s been seven years since Admiral Coeyman and I set
out to revolutionize the web with Pariah Online and our own under
appreciated writings of fiction.?

At the time, for some reason, I felt it important
to advertise our popularity, or lack thereof, by a counter window that
would tell just exactly how many poor, misguided souls had somehow
stumbled upon our page.? In thinking about that very feature today,
it occurred to me how unprofessional and, frankly, silly such an item
was.? Only the most hack web pages bother to track their users in
such a way.? I know for a fact that some people used to visit their
own homepages with great frequency just to boost the numbers on the
counter.? Now really.? Have you ever visited a web page, been
unimpressed, and then, upon seeing how high the counter was said to
yourself, “Well golly!? I guess I DO like this web page more than
I thought I did!”

Of course you haven’t.? Because you are
intelligent.? You know what you like, and you can look at a web
page and know within the first ten seconds or so whether to delve deeper
and seek out its innermost secrets or to dismiss it utterly and return
to the search engine from which it spawned.

Now the previous was just one example of the ways
in which my ideas about WebPages have changed over time.? Back in
‘97 I looked at this (still somewhat new) phenomena called the web and
thought, “Wow, there’s got to be a ton of money in that thing!”?
I don’t feel like such an idiot for that, though.? Better minds
than mine made the same mistake.? We as a capitalistic society
naturally assume that in any place where millions of people are
gathering regular trading items and information is going to mean that
money is going to circulate like crazy.? We’re just not used to
getting and giving everything for free.? But in fact, if we ever
move to a money-less society, the advent of the Internet will forever be
seen as the event that booted us there.? And the reason for this is
simple.? We are so glutted with items that information has become a
commodity that most of us expect and don’t mind trading.? In
fact, most of us will gladly give information for no other reason than
because we like telling people stuff.? It is unnatural to ask
anything in exchange for information.? So we are trying very hard
to take a naturally free thing and shove it into a capitalistic
paradigm.? But as soon as they start making money one place, they
begin to lose it other places.? The success of such companies as
E-bay and Amazon have been followed by the glut of file sharing and
money starts leaking down the drain.

Maybe we need to stop thinking of ways of making
money through the Internet and start thinking of ways to make EVERYthing
free.? Marx had an idea about that, but so far it hasn’t worked
out so hot.? I will have to think about this one and get back to
you.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2003 at 9:39 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.