Baby Internet

The internet is a magical place where you can look for one thing and find something completely different. I was looking at College Humour, which is a brilliant site with really funny videos. One of these was about 'Four Loco', which I had to check to Wikipedia page about. Wikipedia is running another appeal for money, and the article about this said it was the 5th biggest website on the internet. Curious, I went to see what the others were, bringing me to this page; Google Top 1000 of which I saw that blogger.com was quite high up and so leading me here.

Small world, huh?

But the strange thing is that it is a small world, or at least a small internet. You think of the internet as some great thing, and it's so strange that you see the sites on this list and within my lifetime I've seen these sites go from nothing to 'that looks cool' to multi-billionaire corporations. Hell, I still remember the days where facebook sucked compared to bebo!

I still find it strange to think of the internet as being as old as it is, though. I am young, and I remember a time when I didn't have internet, but it's hard to wrap your head around the idea that some of these sites have been around for longer than ten years, and more that that you've been on them for so long. The first website that I have a real track of my use is neopets, where I have an account which is six and a half years ago... six and a half years may not sound too long sometimes, but other times it seems like an eternity.

It almost makes me think.... what the hell are we actually still doing? We've had ipods for the past 4 years, phones which can use internet for the last three, broadband for about four or five... in the years before these it seemed that everything moved so quickly, we created new things all the time. Have we just stopped creating, just spending all our efforts on making what we have better? And these constant improvements seem don't seem to be things necessarily better. I won't mention a certain phone of i...

So what has the last five years or so given us recently? A flat sheet which costs the earth and does the exact same as a tiny laptop? Everything a little faster and a little more broken?

Still, as much as I hate that we aren't changing there is a sense of place when you look at the list of the top sites and get a certain warmth from recognising the ones which you were a part of, the ones that you helped make great.